Tonsurephobia

I hate getting my hair cut. No, it's not a fear of sharp things near my head, nor is it the result of a particularly distressing childhood barbershop experience. (Although there was the time my father decided to save some money by giving us kids a "homestyle" trim involving shears and a bowl. But that's a whole other therapy session.)

And it's not as if things could go spectacularly wrong. Some of my longer-tressed friends have truly harrowing stories of butchered bangs and uncontrolled public sobbing.

So I don't know why I find the experience so unpleasant that I keep putting it off until I reach the "all-over mullet" stage.

Perhaps it's the fact that I can never explain exactly what I want. Every time I'm asked "So, what are we doing today?", I panic. "Um, I'd like it short and neat, but with a bit of length on the top, but not too much, and kind of like the last cut, but something different, and sort of youngish, but not too extreme, and, and..." Really what I'm waiting for is for my stylist to step in and say "Yes I know exactly what will make you look completely hot. Let's do it!" But it never happens. Instead, I get a cut as vague and shapeless as my description.

This is bad enough in my mother tongue; here in France, it is so impossibly hard that when I sit in the salon chair I find myself wishing I was at the dentist.

The next thing I hate about haircuts is the "robe" they swaddle you in. Mankind has not invented a fabric more non-breathingly synthetic than the stuff these are made of.* The temperature outside may be approaching absolute zero, but I guarantee within two seconds of being enveloped in the suffocating embrace of these hellish polyester ponchos, you'll be sweating "like a whore in church", as one of my more sophisticated friends so poetically puts it. Unless you're in a sauna, there is nothing more unpleasant than feeling sweat trickling down your spine.

Then there are the minor irritations. Like not being able to flick the scratchy bits of cut hair from your nose because your hands are bound within the heat tent. Or the awkwardness of having to stare at yourself in the halogen-bright mirror, wondering whether the bags under your eyes always look so dreadfully dark, and then realising that everyone must think how narcissistic you are because you can't tear your gaze away from the haggard vision before you. Or the coiffeuse rolling her eyes and looking at her watch every time you take a sip of coffee.

And finally, the horror of the styling product. When, to make the vague and shapeless look hip and stylish, a few kilos of wax, gel, mud or fudge are slicked and scrunched and twisted through, achieving a look which, even if you'd wanted to, you would never be able to recreate in your own bathroom. So as a last humiliation, you walk home looking like an electrocuted drag queen.

Yes, I hate getting my hair cut. Although I'm proud to say I've just come back from the salon, and I'm not shaking nearly as much as usual. Why? Because I had the brainwave of printing a picture taken of me the last time I was really happy with a haircut (when I was in London for a wedding. I looked hot.) With a raised eyebrow my stylist took one look at the photo, nodded, and reproduced it beautifully. No sweat.

Well, less sweat.

* Yes, I know half of these sentences end with prepositions. As Theodore M. Bernstein says in The Careful Writer (Atheneum: 1968), anyone who calls such expressions wrong will find that he or she "hasn't a leg on which to stand." So there.