Most women will be utterly amazed to learn that this wasn’t always the case. Isn’t it common knowledge that a woman can survive job loss, divorce, death and bankruptcy, but a bad haircut can reduce her to a Prozac-guzzling, housebound wreck? It’s bad enough when you’ve paid good money and had your hair trashed by someone called Tito, but getting your ponytail hacked off without so much as a conversation about “going a bit Sienna ... nice and blunt ... plenty of texture” — well, it’s just unthinkable.
The thing about hair (which, praise God, the High Court judges appreciated) is that it has the potential to make you look both fabulous and terrible. You are nothing without your hair, and yet it can make you a laughing stock. And there’s not a lot you can do once the damage is done (quicker to get your breast size fixed these days than to wait for your ponytail to grow back). This explains the unbridled neurosis, enormous financial outlay and general madness surrounding everything to do with women and hair care. Women are always walking a tightrope: weighing up the wisdom of washing it just before its due date; putting the shine serum on when it’s wet or when it’s dry; knowing that a minute change in the weather, water, drying technique or amount of product used can make the difference between quite pretty and David Helfgott in Shine. The mistake is to assume that hair is just another body part. As if. Your body can disappoint and let you down, but you never go to sleep a glossy size 10 and wake up a sprawling, wrinkled, size 18 with black teeth.
As if that weren’t enough, there’s the whole issue of what your hair says about you. The wrong style and you are shunted straight out of one personality bracket into another. Tether’s 10in blonde ponytail was the perfect hair guise for a 21-year-old dental nurse — clean, fresh, feminine. Her unsolicited shorn-off bob will have left her feeling less of a hygienist and more of a beauty-counter sales girl. Your average 17-year-old would rather dance with her dad in public than be separated from her hair straighteners, and so on. In fact, haircuts shouldn’t be viewed in the same light as wardrobe makeovers and weight loss. Haircuts are on a par with life-changing choices — such as coming out or getting divorced (when you always have a rite-of-passage cut). Finally, the law has recognised that when a woman says, “I’m having a bad hair day”, she should be taken seriously.