The year without friends has also been the year without haircuts

• Date: 19 December 2020
• Author: Tanya Sweeney
• Published date: 19 December 2020
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

If there's a profligate, outlandish ritual that purports to make you feel better, I've likely given it a lash.

Of this ungodly amount of money and time, a lot of it was spent in hair salons. Tints, highlights, treatments, trends. I once spent a painstaking seven hours in a stylists' chair going from dark brown to blond, like it was my professional obligation to look a certain way.

But just as this has been the year without friends, cinema visits and concerts, this has also been the year without haircuts. I didn't have a hairstyle so much as a knife-accidentally-stuck-in the-toaster scenario. If I were living in the 1980s, I'd be a thing of beauty. But we aren't, so I'm not. Things up top had been decidedly crispy and dull, probably for the first time in my adult life.

It has been slightly liberating; fiscally, at any rate. With some measure of distance between the old me (pencil skirts, hot rollers, could cycle across the city in five-inch heels) and the new me (stretchy trousers, a permanent top-knot, no make-up), it's easy to see how much energy and effort is expended on these beauty and grooming rituals.

In between lockdowns, I gladly booked a haircut, like many other women. I looked forward to taking some pride in my appearance again. But the appointments coincided with deadlines, or interviews, or just life. And this year, haircuts, and extensive personal grooming in general, somehow didn't feel quite so important. Glamour - something I'd enjoyed and put emphasis on for so long - was entirely surplus to requirements.

It has been the year in which to ask: why exactly did I spend so much time and money on skincare, hair products, make-up and beauty treatments? Was I a marketeer's impressionable dream? I suppose it all made me feel good. Ask any woman, and they'll likely tell you that one of the best bits of a night out is the getting ready beforehand. The theatre of drawing on an artful face, with anticipation hanging in the air like cologne, the appraisal in the mirror on a particularly good hair day… well, it was my happy place.

If you were so inclined, you could rail about the considerable emotional and financial labour involved in women attempting to attain a bodily ideal in the West. But the truth is, taking pride in your appearance, the putting of your literal best face forward, is something that bleeds...