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About
Iona Pryce

Iona Pryce

I keep a folder of haircut photos sorted by hair texture, not by whoever's face is in them. My own hair is thick, coarse, and currently growing out of a decision I made in March.

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I asked for a bob in 2019 using a photo of a woman whose hair was nothing like mine. Hers was straight and shiny and about half the thickness. Mine grows outward before it grows down. Six weeks later my head was a triangle and I lived in a claw clip until February.

That’s the whole reason this site exists. Not the triangle exactly, but what I did after it.

The folder

I started saving haircut photos with a note underneath each one. Hair type, how long it looked like it had been growing, whether the woman had clearly spent forty minutes with a round brush that morning. There are about 400 of them now. My sister thinks this is a strange thing to have.

Most people pick a cut off a face. A round face, a long face, that sort of thing. I think texture matters more. A blunt lob on fine hair and a blunt lob on coarse hair are two different haircuts with the same name, and only one of them will look like the photo.

What I actually do with them

I try cuts. On me, mostly, and on my sister when she lets me book her in. Then I photograph the grow-out at week two, week six, and around week ten, because that’s when you find out whether you got a haircut or a commitment.

I write down what it needed. Did it look fine after air drying, or did it want a diffuser and a prayer. How long before it started sitting oddly at the back. What the hairdresser did that I couldn’t repeat at home.

Twice a week something goes up. Sometimes it’s a cut I liked and can’t recommend.

Clothes come into it more than I expected

A collar changes a haircut. So does anything with a high neck, and so does hair length landing exactly at your shoulder seam. I didn’t plan to write about clothes at all. Then I noticed I’d stopped wearing half my shirts after a shorter cut, and it seemed worth mentioning.

Nothing here is a trend forecast. It’s just what stopped working and why.

Still bad at

Blow-drying the back of my own head. Genuinely awful at it, after years.

Also I never stick to a routine. I’ll buy the right product, use it for three weeks, and then it lives under the sink.

There’s a pair of thinning shears in the bathroom drawer that I’m not allowed to touch. My sister hid them once. She was right to.