Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Short is HOT




I know this post about short hair is long over due. The trend has been around, for, like, a decade or something but I was known as the girl who always had long hair and no matter how much I like seeing all tose cute pixie-ish hair cuts I just couldn't imagine myself with short hair. Images of my junior high schoool days when everyone was in love with Demi Moore's cute crop in the 90s hit "Ghost" including my mom and myself always held me back from taking that plunge. You see, that obsession with Demi Moore, led us to a hairstylist one day, and I ended up walking out of there with the (then) coveted do. It was a terrible decision. Back then I did not realize that the decision to cut one's hair boy like, means that one has to strive even harder to prove that one is truly a woman. I was a late bloomer and more in love with my beat up jeans than my floral dresses. That said, you can probably imagine what I must have looked like. Yup, I looked like a boy! and this was the day when the only item of makeup in my bag was a chapstick. Hmmm... A friend of my mother even mistook me for a son instead of daughter. That day I started washing my hair everyday in the hope of making it grow faster. I also made a vow to myself never again to have short boyish hair cut.

However... 15 years down the line, I started to become intrigued once again by that oh-so-cute cut. First its Audrey Tatou in Amelie with her extra short fringe and cute, wavy bob . But that is still quite modest, it is still a bob and it is still quite feminine. Some years after that movie the bob craze took place, and I succumbed. I let Wisnu from Irwan Team Pondok Indah Mal do the owner of cutting my long locks short for the first time in 15 years. I was so happy with the result that I have never gone back to having long hair again.

After almost 2 years of the bob cut. I needed a change. I was thinking to myself, maybe it's time to look into super short cuts. I first fell in love with Sienna Miller in Factory Girl looked with her Edie Sedgwick short hair and large lashes. And then there was the super cute Miss Deyn with her peroxide pixie cuts. I wish I had the guts to die my hair that color (even though I do not dare to think of how much suffering my black hair will go through during the 8 hour dying process). After some thoughts, having the guts to go super short was the first thing I needed to do.

I thought I would do it one small step at a time, by asking my trusted hair stylist to cut off a little bit more each time. So in my head, my next hair cut would on the short side but not super short. But Wisnu was more cunning than I thought. As usual I spent the hour and a half reading my book (this time its Toni Morrison's Tar Baby) while looking forward to the pleasant surprise ahead when I look at the mirror. After the last few finishing touches, I looked up and saw that my hair was shorter than what I wanted it to be. YOu know the whole Rihanna craze? Yeah, I got that with some modifications. The sides and the back are a bit longer. At first I was horrofied, but after I stepped out of the salon and walked around the mall abit (checking my reflection everywhere I saw a mirror), I started loving it! Now I can proudly say that I LOVE MY HAIR! The cut has settled (I always say that a hair cut needs at least one day to settle to your daily life and routines and also to take the shape of your head) and now my daily beauty routine is cut short from 15 minutes to 5 minutes! Yeay! A bit of wax and a mess up and my hair is ready to go. I don't think I will ever go back to long hair now :)

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

A bit of fashion please..

It has now been three and a half years since I left the beauty and fashion world (so to speak, I started counting when I resigned as the beauty editor of one women's magazine in Indonesia). I have now a totally different occupation, which, I have to admit pays for the bills (mostly bills from my shopping and partying!). While the old one involved working with lipsticks, eyeshadows, hair spray, makeupartists, other beauty and fashion editors, and fashion photographers this new involves working with the finance section reporters, economic news, insurance news, bogus CSR programs and meetings with boring men in suits and boring women in suits (one with a particularly big 'jambul' or quiff as some might say it). Hmm very different I have to say. I am learning A LOT of new things, but sometimes I just miss being back in my old world. I miss having an excuse to look through fashion magazines, call friends for work and a bit of gossip (they were all working in the same field), and being one of the first to find out and have new makeup and other cool stuff. I realized how much I missed this world when I was calling up journos the other day to try and "sell" a story on a CSR program a client did (they like to call it CSR, but frankly speaking it's all bull). I realized that I don't know how to sell these stories because for me they are not important. Well if this was a "real" CSR program then I would do it wholeheartedly, but this was just some lame event that involved a samll amount of donation. And they expect Kompas to write an article on it? Hmm.. I was a journalist (before being a beauty editor I also worked in dailies as well, mind you) and I can spot a time waster a mile away. Anyway.. lets just hope some news paper will pick it up. Right now I want to go back to browsing through beauty and fashion blogs. I just wish that soon we will get a lifestle or fashion client!