I’ve been through the breakup gauntlet many times in my life, and I thought I’d made all the attendant bad life decisions one could possibly make while dealing with lingering heartbreak and rejection, including crying to my mom on the phone, listening to a simply inadvisable amount of Mitski, and occasionally going home with strangers (all adventurous women do!). When my relationship of almost four years—the longest one I’ve ever had, and one in which we lived together and shared a dog—ended this fall, though, I realized that all the breakup agony I’d been through before was mere child’s play. This was real end-of-relationship suffering, and it required the heaviest artillery in the newly single girl’s arsenal: bangs.
To be fair, I did let some time—specifically: three and a half months—elapse between the moment my relationship ended and the one in which I sat down in a salon chair in Los Feliz and showed my hairstylist a reference picture of Dakota Johnson with a bob and bangs, but in a weird way, that haircut was my biggest act of breakup rebellion; my ex-boyfriend had always counseled me not to get bangs because “You’re going to hate styling them and you’ll just get stressed out and pin them up every day.” While he was in no way wrong, I felt a surge of “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” energy course through me at the salon that day that was fairly at odds with my ex’s and my extremely amicable, friendship-forward breakup. Yes, we’re still close, but also…I’m not the same person I was when we were together, and what better way to prove it than by semi-recklessly getting a crisis haircut?
“The first time I got bangs was after a situationship ended,” says Kelsey, 37. “That relationship had felt very liberating for me, and I was excited to be more intentional about putting myself out there. But my hair’s shape had been unintentional for a really long time. I cut the bangs and immediately felt like who I wanted to be in the world—plus they worked! I’d never felt so wanted in the sapphic scene.”
But my hairstylist wasn’t eager to collude in a rash act of independence declared via fringe; before she so much as lifted a pair of scissors to my hair, she sat me down for a serious chat that echoed my ex’s concerns about bangs maintenance, informing me calmly but firmly that my lifelong hair routine of “Do absolutely nothing to it except throw it up in a bun” wouldn’t work with the cut I wanted. “You’re going to have to buy a blow dryer and at least some styling cream,” she advised me, and when I agreed, she ended up giving me a fringed, wonderfully bitchy li’l bob that exceeded my wildest dreams. When I got dressed to go out that night, I didn’t feel like a newly single thirtysomething constantly teetering on the brink of tears; instead, I felt hot, powerful, and (dare I say it?) almost…French?
My breakup-bangs story might represent the very luckiest of those of us who choose to go in for the big chop after a split, but it’s not indicative of everyone’s experience. “Lesbian breakups will literally destroy you, and I wanted to have some kind of control after realizing I wasn’t going to be able to make someone love me again,” says Illyana of their own experience getting breakup bangs.
For what it’s worth, Illyana and I aren’t alone on our hair-centric breakup journeys; no less an authority on single-girl self-maintenance than Nicole Kidman displayed her new bangs at a Chanel show last fall, soon after announcing her split from ex-husband Keith Urban, proving publicly that breakup bangs don’t have to signal doom.
Vacancy Project hairstylist Masami Hosono, though, has a different perspective. “I totally understand the idea of ‘breakup bangs.’ When someone goes through a split, there’s often this urge to do something drastic. And for people who already have short hair or don’t want to cut their overall length, bangs can feel like the most accessible version of a breakup haircut,” they say, adding: “But honestly, bangs are not a small change. They dramatically alter your entire look—sometimes even more than going from long to short. I think a lot of people underestimate how transformative (and committing) bangs really are. Because of that, I’m very careful. If someone wants bangs impulsively, especially in an emotional moment, I take time to really consult before agreeing. If the reason is simply ‘I just got dumped,’ I usually say no.”
Ultimately, the only things separating a fresh set of breakup bangs from a full-scale crashout are perspective and approach; obviously, if you cut your bangs yourself in the bathroom mirror after one too many martinis, you might not be thrilled with the outcome, but that’s why hats exist!
“Since my original breakup bangs, I dated someone who didn’t like them,” reflects Kelsey on the cut. “They’d push them back and try to do it as a compliment (like they wanted to see more of my face), but it felt awful to be constantly critiqued. I stopped trimming them to avoid the issue. Now that we’ve broken up, I’m pretty sure I’ll get the bangs back. Even though I get compliments with either style, and upkeep is a real issue, I feel like I’ve learned how to manage them better, and I want to feel that confidence and intentionality I felt when I first got them."
Even if you get them and hate them, you can apply the same logic to their growing-out process that you should to your broken heart, no matter how badly or how recently it was crushed: “Everything gets better with time.” Hang in there, order a hair-growth serum if you need to, lean on your loved ones, and don’t be too hard on yourself; ’tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, and that applies to a few inches of hair just as much as it does a relationship.
