There's a Reason Why Women With Long Hair Cut It All Off After Their Wedding Day
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The first stop for many newlywed women, post honeymoon, is the hair salon.
On her wedding day, fashion designer Lauren Conrad’s hair fell in loose waves mid-way down her back. A month later, she has a tousled bob. Big Bang Theory star Kaley Cuoco, too, had chest-length hair on her wedding day in January. By April, she’d chopped it into a layered bob. Jessica Simpson also went short soon after she married Eric Johnson over the summer. And the original post-nuptial haircut might belong to Jennifer Aniston, who had hair to rival a Disney princess’s the day she married Brad Pitt, but a sleek, chin-length style in the period that followed.
Tyson Kennedy, a senior stylist and co-owner of Cutler Brooklyn, a new salon in Williamsburg, tells Yahoo Style that it’s common for his clients take scissors to their heads after saying “I do.”
“Ninety percent of the women I cut will grow their hair for their wedding,” he says, “and then afterwards they’ll chop their hair.”
He said that most of them start growing out their hair from the moment they get engaged so they’ll be able to have more ways to style it on their wedding day.
“They’re not sure what they want to do with it for their wedding,” Kennedy says. “The more hair they have, the more options they have.”
Edward Tricomi, master Stylist and co-founder of Warren-Tricomi salons, says that brides also like to keep their hair the same way they’ve worn it for a while before the wedding so they know the photos will look good. No one wants a drastic, might-have-been-a-mistake cut immortalized in a wedding album. “It’s less pressure doing something different to your hair once all the pictures have been taken,” he says.
During that time, Kennedy says their cuts consist only of “dusting the ends or growing the layers” but, in many cases, the women are already dreaming about cutting their hair.
“A good amount of them are already talking about it before they get to the wedding,” he says. “They do it straight after the honeymoon. They usually, at least, wait until after the honeymoon.”
He thinks the impetus to chop their hair is simply because they’ve been letting it grow for long, and watching pretty much anything grow is boring. Plus, big life changes tend to call for extreme hair switch-ups, too.
“It’s a big build up,” he says. “You’ve been getting toward one thing and not been able take any off. After the wedding, it’s sort of like when a rubber band pops back into place. You can do whatever you want again.” He also points out that the textured bob is so popular right now. It makes sense that many young women—Conrad and Cuoco among them—want to try it.
As for the newlywed husbands, do they find themselves wondering how they ended up with a wife with short hair?
“The husband isn’t going to say anything,” Kennedy says, laughing. “It’s kind of the first test for him. He’s going to say, ‘Whatever you want, baby. I love you anyway. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got long hair or short.’”
