All About Hair: January 2017

Indian Girl shave her head for a Cause

raised money for cancer research January 28, 2017

Now a days many of the girls are doing their best to do something from their end for a good cause. As a part of it, they are losing their lovely locks. One of our Indian girl, Naina Ragnekar also shaved her head or the St.Baldrick's event and raised around 780$ with the support of her family and friends.

Below is from her own Words -

"I shaved to raise money for childhood cancer research

My Name is Naina Rangnekar and this is something that I've wanted to do my whole life but i never thought I would have the courage to go through with it. When i was in middle school my best friend's mother had Ovarian Cancer and shortly passed away during the start of high school. All throughout high school my life had been affected by many people around me who had gone through the trauma of cancer. After joining Chi Omega I came to a realization that it's the small things in life that matter. Shaving my head and raising money could be that small thing that someone else needs (especially through donations) and i want to help our community and world as much as possible. Please please donate and Spread the word!"

Her experience from one of the Blog

The crowd cheered when University of Colorado sophomore Naina Rangnekar sat down in a chair, facing the crowd. Rangnekar has big eyes, olive skin and beautiful dark hair that goes past her shoulders — and she cut all of it off.

As the electric razor buzzed her to near-total baldness and big locks of her hair were passed around the crowd, one of her Chi Omega sorority sisters in the crowd yelled, "Naina why are you still so hot?!"

"Why am I doing this right now," she replied, laughing. "Hashtag reality check!"

Naina was one of more than 100 who gained a crew cut on Wednesday during the St. Baldrick's Foundation Fundraiser, an event that has been taking place since 2005 on the CU campus.

Rangnekar, who raised $780, said her friends and family were supportive, but her boyfriend tried to convince her not to do it at the last minute. "As he was stroking my hair, he was like, 'I'll buy you a dog,'" she said.

"Yeah, he tried to bribe me with a dog."

Her boyfriend ended up shaving his head with her.

Rangnekar shaved her head as part of a New-Year's Resolution that was inspired by the event. "My New Year's resolution was to find myself," she said. "A lot of things about image don't really matter in this world — hair clothes. It doesn't change who you are. I wanted to show everyone that. My hair doesn't define me."

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FLUX Photo Story by Lars Brandt Stisen

January 27, 2017

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Headshave for State Theatre's "Baby Teeth"

Baby teeth January 24, 2017

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Bald Ambition by Isha Singh

bald ambition January 21, 2017

By Isha Singh Sawhney

I was 16 when I first hacked my almost waist-length hair down to a GI-Jane buzz, what they called a number 2 on the electric buzzer. The next time was at 25, when I decided to go completely bald. The first was in a fit of teenage angst, the second during what I call relationship rebellion. Yes, such a thing exists, and no, it’s not called rebound.

Let’s start with the first. Back then, I was just the girl with short skirts, chubby knees and buzzed hair – no big deal. But then, teenagers in the ’90s were a far cry from the hypersexual kids of today, obsessed as they are with pop icons, sartorial choices and salon visits. No one really cared if you cut your hair shorter than most boys, wore an ugly sweater and unfashionable nail polish, or didn’t wax your legs till you were legally allowed to vote. Especially if you were the wild tomboy (not on any top-ten-hottest-girls lists), who was the first to be suspected when a bomb went off in the school bathrooms before Diwali.

But in your twenties (and then in your thirties), things are different: sexually, emotionally, intellectually. I had just come out of a physically abusive relationship and gone headfirst into another messed-up, albeit nicer, one. Not quite healed, I was a ticking bomb waiting to combust, and I desperately wanted, nay needed, some kind of transformative action (insert bald head here).

The morning I decided to shave my head, after a night fuelled by Kamikaze shots, I didn’t have a hint of trepidation as my cousin, who was deputed to do the job, picked up the shaver and got started. As long, ponytail-sized clumps fell off and strips of white scalp began to show through, after the first twinge of apprehension in my gut, euphoria set in. I felt lighter, not just because of the actual physical weight of my hair, but almost as if the political, spiritual and emotional burden that came with it had lifted. I felt my sadness and baggage leave me with each lock.

In the days that followed, when I ran my hands over the fresh stubble, there was a big dose of panic mixed in with the liberation. Once that wore off, though, there were a bunch of joyous, more mundane, utilitarian positives: No more shampoo, curling irons or hair dryers. Washing your hair doesn’t need a well-planned itinerary. Bad hair days are a figment of your imagination. Hair ties, obsolete. You can run, do yoga and cycle without getting annoyed by that one obstinate strand that always, always gets in your eyes.

It’s the reactions that were most striking then – when you’ve been relatively easy on the eyes for a while, with a mane people enviously gush over, the shock when they see your now shining white pate is painfully obvious, and pretty much unanimous. Once they get past the fact that you haven’t done this for Tirupati or to donate it to a cancer foundation, you get everything from “WTF! Why would you? You’re such a pretty girl! Why would you purposely get rid of your hair to look like a dyke?” to “You go girl, one million points for women’s empowerment!”

Missives of concern come wrapped in a host of compliments. Not even strangers will hesitate to display a full range of emotions, ranging from pity and surprise to pure revulsion.

In the conservative, traditional, conformist view shared by many in this country, men (and women) see a woman with long, flowing hair and think – subconsciously and sometimes out loud – that here’s a woman who can be loved by a man. You just have to see how men react to women with shaved heads or short-cropped hair to know this to be true. Women without hair are unsexy. They’re threatening.

And so we conform, and spend hours on braiding, straightening, curling, colouring and blow-drying our obsession, ego and vanity. Yes, such obvious womanliness may get you out of a speeding challan or score you a free drink at the bar, but shaving my head gave me the chance to discover an inner, stronger femininity. The day I went bald, I bought myself the boldest pair of earrings I own: huge silver disks with bald, tribal men on them.

For I suddenly had this testosterone-filled attitude that’s kosher in boys, but not girls. When you take off your hair, says a cousin who’s also gone bald twice, you shed the weight of expectations. Men talk to you without being distracted by their subconscious associations with hair: long hair = girl = sex.

My cousin first went bald as a teenager after dating a series of women in New York, to conform to her queer community, where every second person was a bald or buzzed lesbian. The second time, she was getting over a guy “who had destroyed my heart at 22”, and she felt free. “From being a tiny and girly queer girl, suddenly I was all attitude,” she declares.

In me, this same “attitude” stemmed from overcompensation. I lived in a far more conservative Delhi. Feeling exposed without hair, I’d developed a swagger to contend with the stares and comments. What I put out was an androgynous, boy-girl kind of sexiness, interpreted as mental, brave or gutsy. And I loved that badass-ery.

Hair is energy, and when you take it off, you let go of both society’s diktats on conventional beauty and your own ego – the latter as important as the former. And when it grows back, if you’re lucky, it’s natural, stripped of years of wear, with new strength to take on the world – just like you.

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What happens when a girl shaves her head

boy friend headshave January 14, 2017

This article is published in the below link and it's reproducing here.

http://thoughtcatalog.com/danielle-phillips/2012/06/what-happens-when-a-girl-shaves-her-head/

When I was 21, a junior in college, my then-boyfriend and I shaved our heads. I shaved my shoulder-length hair Sinead O’ Connor-Natalie Portman-in-V-for-Vendetta bald. As to the why, well, if we were to ask my friends and relatives, here is why I did it:

To be different
Because my boyfriend told me to
Because I was on drugs (sort of true if marijuana counts)
Because I was in a cult (my Mom’s theory)
Because I was a punk rocker (a cousin’s take)

The truth is that one not-so-spectacular day my then-boyfriend and I were studying at a cafe. This conversation followed:

Me: I always wondered why girls can’t shave their heads. I used to shave my high school boyfriend’s head and would love to do that myself. It looks low maintenance.

Then-boyfriend: Why can’t you?

Me: I don’t know, why can’t I? Let’s shave our heads.

Then-boyfriend: Okay.

So we went to his apartment and shaved our heads. Did I think this was extreme? Yes, actually, and back then, I was okay with extremities. (For I felt that within myself there was a giant, empty vase and in order to fully live, to fully know, I needed to do as much as possible to fill that vase with as many experiences as I could — whether good or bad. So I said yes more than no.) I was also very political and rebellious at that time as most young college students are and had begun to think of myself as a feminist. I didn’t wear makeup, deodorant, or shave consistently. Hair was just hair. It would grow back.

I figured I’d get some grief from a few people, maybe even stares, but for the most part everything would go on as before. I was wrong. What followed was a highly emotional, exposed, wrenching period for me. My mother became hysterical and convinced I was on drugs or in a cult. She cancelled my 21st birthday party. My friends insisted my then-boyfriend had brainwashed me and that I had done it to make him love me. Strangers routinely walked up to me wanting to know what sort of statement I was looking to make or if I had cancer. Men no longer leered or hit on me but would simply stare or openly mock. After years of trying to be pretty, wanting boys to think me desirable, I became a kind of asexual curiosity.

I had not prepared myself for the reactions and did not handle them well. I cried more than I had before or since, even in public, and I, as a rule, do not express emotion in public. It became an alienating and depressing time in my life. I was angry and sad that something so small (Hair! And my hair grows really fast!) could cause those who loved me to behave so meanly. I was still me — a bald me, but still basically myself. And I was ashamed, embarrassed about my looks — after all, I reasoned, I must have looked pretty f—ing bad for people to get so upset about it. I realized then (and this was a disappointing realization) that when we don’t toe the line of femininity, don’t dress and behave the way we are expected to, we become outcasts, freaks.

But throughout the shame I was made to feel, I stubbornly refused to cover up. There were no wigs or scarves. No attempts to hide my baldness. I wore a soft beanie the then-boyfriend gave me on very cold days, but for the most part brandished my bare head like a weapon. No matter what I wouldn’t hide from what I’d done.

And after a few months, the hair, as it is wont to do, grew back. I kept it close-cropped for a while. The longer it got, the more my identity as a woman became acknowledged. I was told I looked like an edgy model or Demi Moore in GI Jane. Men began to see me. When it grew out a little more, I got a job as a hostess at a fancy Japanese restaurant. The pixie cut became stylish instead of crazy. And my mom eventually came around. But did I?

Well, I let my hair grow long again and started wearing makeup. I found that it was okay to be pretty, in fact, I felt I had earned the right. That was 10 years ago. I’m now married and a mother and like most women my age, I have long hair, wear make up, get manicures and even love shopping. Time has tempered the rebellious, extreme part of me. But that shaved-headed girl is always inside, looking out, knowing that our identity is a haircut away from being taken. One day, when anyone least expects it, I may get bored of looking like everyone else and do it again. I won’t cry this time.

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Artist Apnavi Thacker - Bold and Bald

apnavi thacker bald head January 05, 2017

P.S : This Article is taken from the archive of http://loverbald.livejournal.com/.

Artist Apnavi Thacker is a famous Artist. She’s famous in India and abroad (she lives between Mumbai and Geneva) for her paintings and installations. Here is the experience of her in her own words.

But it’s in a tiny salon tucked away at Kemp’s Corner, that she’s the local hero. Fourteen years ago, the 17 year-old with hair that brushed her bottom, walked in for a trim. She walked out bald.

“I still visit the place to get my eyebrows done, and the women there remember how I told them to shave the whole load off. They freaked out,” laughs Apnavi, who had been itching to “try it out for a while”.

Apnavi was fed up of really long hair, she tells you, when you ask her why. But then that wasn’t the only reason, she adds a second later between introspective babble.

“I didn’t need long, curly locks to look beautiful. That was it. In fact, it was coming in the way of my face. I looked so much better without it,” she says, labeling it her most liberating experience.

Mom was shocked, dad played along, friends loved it, and finally, everyone got used to it.

Since then, Apnavi has moved back and forth, experimenting with various lengths. A year ago, she decided to go bald again, and has maintained it since. “I buzz it once a week at home, and what a relief it is to be free from blow drying, haircut appointments, blah blah...”

All you need is a confident attitude to carry it off, says the “veteran”. And that will bring on positive reactions from most.

“There will always be that odd-ball, stupid man who will stare at you in complete disbelief. But who cares!” she scoffs.

You will also bump into the “Oh! Are you all right?” species, Apnavi admits. While travelling in the Middle East, her hairstyle gets her special treatment. “I jump all the queues because they think I’m ill,” she grins.

Here are few other pics of her in Bald look.