Story by Hannah Lang
There was a moment, as the razor buzzed near his ear, when Evan Castillo started to have second thoughts.
“I looked at it for a minute like ‘Ah, I’m really about to do this’, and then I last-minute contemplated all my other options.” says the 19 year-old from Buxton, N.C. “And then I realized there weren’t any. So I just did it.”
And just like that, his trademark wavy black hair— that had started to get long, like, unmanageably long — was gone.
“I kind of regret it,” he laughs. “Only ‘cus I never really wanted it in the first place.”
The state’s salons, along with its gyms, public schools and massage parlors, have been closed for more than five weeks. And be it out of boredom, stir-craziness or sheer necessity, North Carolinians are taking hairstyling into their own hands.
Castillo’s hair is the shortest it’s ever been now — but if there was ever a time to shave all your hair, he says, he guesses this is it.
“When is this gonna happen again?” he says. “No one’s gonna see you, just do it. It’ll be fun. It gives you something to talk about.”
***
Unlike Castillo, Clara Matthews was ready for a change.
She’d let her short hair grow out a bit and return to its natural color while studying abroad in Spain, but since she came back home to stay with family in Wilmington, she’d had the urge to switch it up.
“Dying, bleaching my hair, it’s something I’ve done before, so it was something I was really comfortable with,” she says.
She decided to go for a dramatic look: shaving her head and dying the remaining hair a light purple. When she first turned on the razor, she ran it right down the middle of her head.
“So there was no concealing it,” she says. “There was no chance that I could chicken out after.”
Different hairstyles are a way for her to express herself, even if she’s staying inside the house all the time.
“I change my hair to reflect who I am and the things that I go through,” she says. “And sometimes just because I want to have fun! It’s just that simple.”
Everybody really likes the new cut and color, she says, with one exception.
As Matthews did her hair in the bathroom, her mother and grandmother chatted away on the phone upstairs.
Clara is changing her hair, her mother said in Spanish. She’s shaving her hair really short and dying it purple.
Matthews heard her grandmother’s response from the bathroom.
“QUE FEA!” she cried. How ugly!
“They didn’t care when I came out, they didn’t care when I got my nose pierced,” Matthews says, shaking her head. “But suddenly I’m shaving my head and it’s all ‘Que fea!’”
***
Sabrina Lazaro anticipated that all this cabin fever might have some reaching for the nearest pair of scissors.
“I knew a lot of people were going crazy, and that’s kind of the first thing I would do in quarantine, probably, is cut my own bangs,” she says.
The stylist at Arrow Chapel Hill took to Facebook to prevent a particularly prevalent kind of at-home styling: trimming your own bangs. Lazaro’s post in Babes Who Blade, a popular Facebook group frequented by UNC students, provides a video tutorial.
“I say this like a parent giving their child condoms,” she wrote in the post. “I don’t want you to do it but I know you will so I’m going to make sure you do it safely!”
Lazaro is somewhat sympathetic to her viewers — it was her own history of crazy hair decisions that led her to become a professional stylist.
“Probably since I was in eighth grade, I was dying my hair and doing stuff to my hair and melted it off a few times with bleach and shaved it and started over,” she says.
But now, she’s trying to keep others from making any mistakes that could seriously damage their hair. Even if you head to the salon as soon as it opens again, she says, there’s no guarantee a professional can’t fix everything — particularly the harsh and long-lasting effects of bleach.
“There’s only so much we can do,” she warns. “We are not magicians!”
She’s heard from a lot of friends since the start of the statewide lockdown, trying to get her opinion on their various at-home hairstyling ideas.
“Do you think I should do this?” they ask her.
“No!” she tells them. “Absolutely not.”
***
But these are desperate times, after all.
Jona Boçari had never attempted to trim her own bangs before — but hers were growing way too long to wait for a trip to the salon.
When she attempted to trim them herself, she recounts, it actually wasn’t that bad.
“I looked up a bunch of articles on how to do it,” she says.
She recommends using an electric razor and never cutting your bangs wet, which can make them appear longer than they are. But the length may not be perfect, and that’s OK.
“It was a bit shorter than I had intended, but we’re not going anywhere. Luckily my bangs grow pretty fast,” she says. “I looked like I had 1950s Katy Perry bangs for a week and then that was fine, because they grew out a little bit.”
There are more important things than how your hair looks, she says. At the end of the day, bangs are just bangs.
But for some, their hair becomes something more significant, providing a sense of control in a time of chaos.
For Kristina Stallings, 22, the experience of shaving all her hair off felt grounding.
“I felt normal doing it. I literally didn’t think about anything else for the hour or so when I was shaving my head,” she says. “I have been stressing so much about everything going on. And just sitting there and doing something for yourself for an hour — whether it’s shaving your head or painting your nails — it’s so freeing, honestly, you don’t think about anything else.”
Maybe a drastic hair change is exactly what people need these days, she says.
“I’ve always looked at my hair as a security blanket, and I’ve defined my own beauty by my hair length or my hair color or anything like that,” she says. “And I just wanted to get rid of that. And I thought now is the perfect time because, you know, I’m not going to see anybody for a month or two. No one’s going to see me.”
Castillo doesn’t feel quite as empowered by his style choice, and he’s still not sold on his at-home cut — but there is one upside.
He pulls on a baseball cap and shrugs, smiling for the camera on Zoom.
“With a hat?” he laughs. “It’s kind of a look!”
