The Six-Month Haircut

Stop going from cut to cut, and build a road map for change

- By Chris Rovzar

I’ve had roughly the same haircut for a decade. Like a lot of people, I find comfort in delivering my precise specifications to a barber. I could take my head to any chair and say, “No. 2 clipper on the sides, fade it in, and a half-inch offthe top.”

It’s not just that I liked the predictability and don’t like the chitchat. It’s because in my early 20s, I made some truly gruesome hair errors. I grew it down to my eyelashes—picture early Justin Bieber, or the McDonald’s Fry Guy—and bleached it electric blond. I spent two years twitching it out of my eyes.

I’ll never forget the overwhelming joy from friends and strangers that came when I switched to a tight fade. Even a bouncer at a Meatpacking District nightclub, who I was shocked even knew I existed, said, “Thank God you cut your hair.” This caused some self-examination and a vengeful review of my close friendships. (Why had no one told me it was so bad?) I decided to just pick an easy cut and go with it. Forever.

And then, last June, I met Kristan Serafino, a celebrity stylist who’s worked with Ryan Reynolds, Shawn Mendes, and Robert Pattinson—men with thick, glorious, deliciously swirling locks. Whipped cream hair. The hair equivalent of the food the Lost Boys imagine for dinner in the film Hook.