The Hair Cave, Stars, and How The Fairytale Ends

It started in 2014, when I joined a forum called longhaircommunity.com under the username long.hairgirlnz. By the standards of that forum, I was the short-haired one. There I stumbled into a subculture of people who spritzed perfume onto their brushes before their hundred nightly strokes, and who used the phrase "fairytale ends" to describe the soft, tapered, horseshoe-shaped hemline you get when you let hair thin out naturally instead of cutting it blunt.

No one on the forum was in a hurry. People posted progress photos months apart, and the most celebrated posts were showing a slightly lower hemline, with dates pasted atop the side-by-side photos. This community is devoted to something so slow. Growing hair is a life-long project measured in seasons. You have to tend to it and wait.

The hundred nightly strokes were the heart of it. The small pause at the end of the day takes around ten minutes., and I will do it no matter where I am in the world. On a long haul bus in Vietnam, staying at a chateau in Corsica, or in the nude in rural Spain with no internet or running water. 

One theory, from the writer Elaine Morgan, is that women's long hair exists because babies needed something to hold on to, clinging to their mothers in the water. They would swing their wee bodies around and take sips of breastmilk. It's a contested idea, sure, and scientists have argued about it for decades, but I love it anyway. Hair as the first thing we ever held. 

I keep my HINU hair oil in my beat-up leather handbag. My friends sit between my knees and I work it slowly through their hair. Sometimes this is when the party has simmered to a few people gathering around the projector in the living room taking turns picking a song to play on YouTube. 

I love how hair holds time. My mumma always says the greatest gift you can give anyone is time. She would trim my hair in the carpark of New World Wanaka on my fifteen minute break when I was working there during my university holidays. She still does the best, tightest, tidiest French braids in my hair. 

Empress Elisabeth of Austria, Sissi to her friends, had mid-calf-length hair. It was washed once every three weeks in raw eggs and brandy, and it took a full day. Afterwards she would pace the palace in a waterproofed silk dressing gown (I want one) until it dried. Nobody dared to rush her.

She wore hairpins made of diamonds and pearls, and if someone at a gathering particularly struck her, she'd take out one of her "Sissi Stars" and give it to them to keep. She had two sets of twenty-seven made. I found some glass ones in an op shop and wore them in Vienna last year, when I visited St Stephen's Cathedral, where Sissi once attended church.

Then there's the French novelist Colette, whose ash-blonde hair was famously "long enough to lower a bucket down a well." She wrote about wearing it in two braids, using them as a paintbrush and as "ribbons to make the cat play." Her hair, in her telling, was something between a toy and a limb. She cut it off at twenty-nine. I have no plans to cut mine, but I like that she knew when she was finished with having it long.

The New Zealand artist Vivian Lynn worked with human and synthetic hair, tangling the two together so you couldn't tell which was which without touching. The way she wanted to show it, and never got to, wasn't in a gallery. She wanted it in a cave, lit by a single lantern.

I've been in a hair cave. It's in a small town in Türkiye, and its walls are papered floor to ceiling in notes with women's names and a lock of their hair. A man runs it. His assistant cut a lock of mine while she told me how it began: he loved a woman from Germany, her visa ran out, and on her way out she left him a lock of her hair. He pinned it to the wall.

Then other women started leaving locks too. For him, I guess, or for the story. Fifty years later there are sixteen thousand of them, nailed and taped up the walls, most strands are still glossy. 

Mine is there. I like knowing that somewhere in a cave, a small part of me is still held with everyone else's. It feels like the first time I posted to the Long Hair Community forum. 

Hair is patient. You look after it, you pass it on, and you are always leaving little bits of it behind. Once, a flatmate I hadn’t lived with for many years messaged me that he had found one of my hairs wrapped around his toe. 

A song to send you on your way, by long-haired Crystal Gayle.