Dying for Botox but don’t want to spend the cash? Cut your bangs!
By: Bianca Teixeira
First things first, I KNOW, OKAY?
I know how we feel about bangs. Cute and maintainable for celebs like Dakota Johnson and Zooey Deschanel but a cry for help from us normies. Little did I know that with a quick snip, I’d be hiding one of my least favourite attributes and saving the ones I love most from hearing me wax poetic about Botox constantly.
In the fall, when I sent around the obligatory text to my friends asking if I should make the leap and get bangs (again) most of the immediate responses were “Everything okay?!” And everything was, I swear!
I had just started a new job and wanted to go in fresh and anew, a butterfly emerging from her cocoon of two small kids and exactly zero extra time to style extraneous hairdos in the morning. What could go wrong…right?
I’d been thinking about getting bangs for a while and of course, as soon as the thought hummed out of my body at 2 am on a nondescript Tuesday, my For You page on Instagram was lousy with images of be-banged women looking untenably chic. I had had bangs once before, when I answered an X (nee Twitter) call out from Flare Magazine (RIP) looking for girls to get banged…in a stylist’s chair, that is. I asked for blunt and that’s what I got and LOVED them. Until a few days later when I had to style them myself of course.
But that was the past! I’m a responsible 30-mumble woman now, not a 24-year-old barely paid writer looking for any excuse not to wash her hair again. Having bangs once more would not only provide me with a break from the kids to wash and style it at LEAST once a week, but also force me to treat myself to a trim in a salon every four to six weeks. LFG.
Of course, as I type this, my woefully grown out bangs are slicked back and bobby pinned within an inch of their lives because it’s been two months since I had them trimmed. But reader, I swear I love them! And not just because, unlike 10 years ago, you can get away with allowing a natural wave to see the light of day. They also perfectly cover my forehead and keep me from looking directly into a handful of deep-set lines I’ve wanted to poke with poisonous needles for the last five years.
I’ve never had a good poker face and wear my large-scale expressions everywhere, from the grooves in my forehead to the wrinkling of my chin and all the glorious crows feet in between. When I tell a story (and dear god, do I ever tell stories) every sentence is punctuated with an exaggerated expression, solidifying those wrinkles into the history of my I know we’re all supposed to love ourselves an appreciate the journey that our bodies go through during this magical thing that we call life, but those top face trenches can beat it.
Except now…I never think of them. Now when I look in a mirror, especially when I haven’t put on makeup, I’m too distracted by my bangs (and combing, trimming and playing with them) to think to push them aside and focus on the creases that lie a literal hair away. I haven’t thought or even joked about Botox in months!
Which means that if I’m calculating my Girl Math correctly, I have around $200 free dollars burning a hole in my wallet!
