Terminal length – by Lana Guineay
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She clipp’d a precious golden lock,
She dropp’d a tear more rare than pearl
— Christina Rosetti
My hair is a thick mass of black waves that falls to my waist. Mermaid hair, Rapunzel hair, Pre-Raphaelite hair, cult hair. It has not always been this long. I came into the world too early, too small, crying and bruised and accompanied by a twin sister – I was not alone, even in the womb. As a premature newborn, I had a comma of soft black hair. Think of this: the powdery smell of a baby’s downy head. The side of my sister’s head was shaved in the NICU, giving an intravenous line access to her scalp, the place where the superficial temporal vein runs anterior to the ear, chosen only because there were no other veins large enough in her tiny body. The nurse shaved the other side for symmetry, which gave my sister a mohawk for her first six months of life, as well as providing a reliable way to distinguish between two identical babies.
I have dyed my hair lighter exactly three times. With great expense and effort, I have patiently waited for my hair to burn first orange and then caramel. It doesn’t look as good as my natural colour but at least it looks different. As I enter my thirties, my hair becomes more set in its ways. Chemicals and salon small talk coax only a subtle ombre: dark sable to raven. Overwhelmingly and steadfastly, it has been black. There is something reflective and bold about black hair. I would like to be the same. In the last few years, the first silver hairs have appeared at my temples, thrillingly. Sometimes they look like reflections, the shine of lights, and I wonder, how can white look like black? Others emerge wiry and opinionated, a finger pointing.
I am growing my hair. Because it is the easiest thing to do. Because I want to see how long I can grow it. On hair forums they have a term for how long your individual head of hair can ever reach due to your unique profile of growth rate and genetics and environment: terminal length. The maximum length your hair can grow before the follicle enters the shedding phase typically ranges from 60–90 cm. For some people it’s shoulder length, others past your ankles. Mine measures 76cm. I picture my hair stretching beyond my body, making the rest of me insignificant.
Is it real? Is it all yours? Are you wearing a wig? Is it naturally that colour? People sometimes feel they can touch my hair without my consent, testing its veracity. In a fish and chip shop in Byron, a man plucked a hair from my head without asking or talking to me. I turned, surprised, feeling it plucked from my scalp. He smiled, called out thanks and left. Whatever charms or totems he constructed from the strand of my hair seem to have had no effect. Or have they?
The oldest known sentence written in the earliest alphabet is a hair spell. A Bronze Age ivory comb was unearthed in 2017 in Lachish, a Canaanite city of the second millennium BCE (roughly 1700–1500 BCE). The inscription reads: ‘May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard’. A magical incantation, a protection spell. In witchcraft, hair magic uses strands from the object (collected in fish and chip shops or elsewhere) in what’s known as a ‘tag lock’, to connect spells to a specific person, the strand symbolising their personal essence, power, energy. Such spells can be found reaching back to antiquity in love charms (using pubic hair) protection spells (braids/ wind knots) and cleansing rituals.
A woman’s beauty is sometimes in her hair, as is her strength. On occasion it is so strong it offers escape, a rope to climb and be rescued. Fairytale hair. Possessor of powers and secrets. Perhaps it’s not true that my hair is my prettiest feature. Perhaps it’s my wit or my eyes or the way I love. I like the feeling of my hair when it’s wet on a very hot day. I like the sweep of it over my shoulders on a crisp one, or how it tucks into the back of my winter coat. I like how it waves like the sea and is as mercurial: sometimes thick and frothy and full, other times sleek and calm. Sometimes it falls around me like a nun’s veil. I like that it covers.
My father has given me nothing but black hair. Paternity not acknowledged, says my birth certificate. But our hair tells another story.
Religious orders have practiced tonsure for centuries – an act of self-sacrifice, shedding vanity and signifying devotion. In the 19th century, ‘church hair’ was sold to help fund European convents and monasteries. Today, the tonsure halls of Tirumala, India, a Hindu pilgrimage site, is home to the most valuable hair in the world: the Indian hair trade is worth more than $700 million a year.
At around age seven, my twin sister’s daughter had grown her golden-brown hair to her waist. On a whim, she cut it all off into a short bob with a fringe. Would I be me if I cut my hair? In The Lover, Marguerite Duras writes of cutting off her remarkable long copper hair: ‘I said “Cut it off.” And he did. All at once, a clean sweep, I felt the cold scissors on the skin of my neck. It fell on the floor. They asked me if I wanted to keep it, they’d wrap it up for me to take away. I said no. After that people didn’t say I had pretty hair anymore, I mean not as much as they used to, before. Afterwards they’d just say, “She’s got nice eyes and her smile’s not unattractive.”’What would they say of me? Would I keep my cut locks wrapped in paper like a bouquet?
My sister sends me a screenshot. If you Google ‘is it true’, the first autocomplete suggestion that appears is this: is it true that hair holds memories?
A single strand of hair typically lasts between two and seven years before falling out, passing through growth (anagen), transition (catagen), and resting (telogen) phases. Hair grows at a rate of 1–1.5 cm per month, and you shed around 100 hairs every day. How many memories do you shed? How long do you hold them?
In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, European men of fashion often wore a lovelock, a long piece of hair plaited and positioned over the left shoulder – the heart side – to show devotion.
The history of hair work – jewellery, art and keepsakes from human hair – is one of love and death. To hold someone’s hair near you, woven into a ring, coiled in a locket, is to have congress with that person, to declare, I love, or, I have loved. While this art originated in the 15th century, it flourished in the Victorian era. Queen Victoria, on losing her beloved Prince Consort Albert in 1861, ushered in a popular fashion for mourning, and is said to have sometimes offered her own hair as favours. This was a time of public ritual, studied response, formal mourning attire and posthumous portraits of corpses. Through sentimental and codified aesthetics people were encouraged to give expression to their grief. Hair, lasting indefinitely, was an obvious material to turn to. Hair artists were engaged to turn locks into jewellery and works of art, but many were made by grieving women themselves. In parlours, bedrooms, kitchens, hair was woven like fine lace, fashioned into fleurs-de-lys, constructed into elaborate wreaths, accented with gold wire and pearls. Preserving the transient nature of life and of loved ones, this women’s work served as a memento mori, talisman, memorial. Hair work from this golden age is today often a brackish brown, the colour of decaying things, even when encrusted with seed pearls, enamel, gems.
I have four velvet drawstring bags, the kind in which you would keep a pile of glittering diamonds, containing Mum’s hair. That is all that’s left of her. The light auburn tresses are liberally streaked with grey, snipped from her dead head by a mortician, coiled like sleeping snakes. There is one bag for each of her children, though I have them all. I don’t know why. Perhaps I forgot to tell my siblings about them in the deep-sea haze of sudden grief and organising the funeral and Mum’s things, all the tasks that fell to me, eldest child. Why don’t I tell them now? I don’t know. It’s not that I wanted to keep more of her — or is it?
Mum had lighter hair than mine, redder, the colouring you sometimes see in Pre-Raphaelite paintings, which in my mind I have mixed up with the real memory of her. Particularly The soul of the rose by another Victorian, Waterhouse. The woman in the painting not only bears a resemblance to my mother in her youth but features her most-loved flower, the peach rose we had at her funeral. The painted hair, woven through with gems, is too red to be true to Mum’s. Though she did paint her own; she would dye her hair periodically in shades so similar to her natural colour, that to me they seemed indistinguishable. This act was undertaken by her women kin: my aunty, myself, my sister. I remember those dye boxes sitting on her kitchen counter over the years, always waiting, mousses and foams and tinctures with names like Ginger gold, Golden auburn, Chestnut brown, Pure copper, Warm golden brown, Light copper mahogany, Light auburn. Now I wonder if it was a way for her to connect, to ask for human touch, for affection, for company. I’ve got to colour my hair, are you free?
‘My mum had brown auburn hair,’ I say with certainty. There is much about my mum I can’t say with certainty, but I can say that she was a hair model in the eighties, that she favoured long fringes like I do, that in her thirties onwards she wore it short like Lady Diana, with whom she shared that peculiar sideways-glancing shyness. That when we heard of Lady Di’s death, we were baking a chocolate cake together. That we didn’t share a hue but she passed down a thickness and gloss. That her hair lost its coppery richness in her last years.
(The boxes of hair dye stopped appearing on her kitchen counter. She stopped reaching out for connection. Then she just stopped.)
It’s easy for me now to braid these strands together, Mum’s auburn locks with my own, the history of genes and magic and hair work and grief. It’s easy for me to look at the life force of my hair – it is so strong and grows so rapidly that I sometimes feel I can literally watch it expand – and wonder: where does it end? What invisible line will it reach, unknown to me, where genetics and fate say this, and no more? ▼
Image: Rahul Pandit - Pexels
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