Lena Dunham explains why cutting your own hair is an awesome experience

“I will never forget the first time I cut my own bangs: the power, the adrenaline. I was twelve years old, standing in the fluorescent light of my parents’ bathroom with a pair of orange-handled craft scissors, unaware that I was standing on the precipice of self-definition.

The sound of the first chop, thick and harsh, was thrilling. I watched my hair pile up in the sink, then looked into the mirror: I had given myself blunt, successive layers that resembled a staircase headed to nowhere. Nothing about the haircut could have been perceived as skilled, fetching, or even sane. But I had never felt more alive.

“I want to feel beautiful in a way people can understand, and yet I want to feel like my own tiny revolution. Every time my hair is blown flat or (God forbid) curled with a small but mighty iron, I lose a piece of myself. It’s taken practice and establishing an almost marital intimacy with my hairstylist Rheanne White for her to understand just the amount of weird I need to feel while also being properly armored for Hollywood’s roughest moments.

But I never want to lose that edge, that sense of experimentation that fueled my twelve-year-old boldness (and the baby bangs of a nineties-era Winona I self-trimmed earlier this year).”