When hair stylist Aleona Starzhinskaia decided to give a special cut to model Julia Andreeva in time for her birthday, she filmed the process and posted it on Facebook. Little did the two know that the video would go viral with eight million views as of press time, and inspire outrage among viewers and on major news outlets.
If you haven’t heard of or seen the video, you can watch it in its entirety below:
STYLISH CUTQuirky, Stylish and Smooth? Is this a new trend in the making? #StylistLove #ScissorsCut #HairCut
Posted by Barbershapp on Saturday, 20 February 2016
Sure, the cut is pretty drastic, but the reactions online displayed disproportional outrage. Refinery29 culled a few of the comments, such as “Looks like a crazy person who cut her own hair,” and “I think I can safely speak on behalf of the nation by saying that this is most definitely NOT going to be a trend. I have no other words.”
Sensationalist websites (most of which are UK-based, go figure) posted grabby, reactive headlines: “Barbershapp’s Haircut Video Is Nail-Bitingly Horrifying But We Just Can’t Stop Watching,” wrote The Huffington Post UK. “The biggest botch job ever? See the horrendous hairut that has been hailed ‘the next big thing,” the Mirror announced. And the ever-reliable clickbait time-suck The Daily Mail went straight to the point—“A terrible hair cut that inspired over 30,000 comments online.”
Yeesh. Can everybody calm down, please? It’s a haircut, people. Relax a little.
Is Julia’s hair a little on the edgy side? Sure. Will this be a trend? It’s not likely, but that isn’t because it is “horrendous” or a “botch job,” or other enraged superlatives thrown around by the media or online commenters. It’s because not everybody is as awesome as Julia or has the amazing bone structure to pull such a cool haircut off.
More importantly, many probably don’t have Julia’s balls to try going for a look like this because of society’s rigid beauty standards. And can we blame them? One woman decides that she doesn’t want the long, wavy locks of a Victoria’s Secret Angel, and the entire Internet flips the heck out. Everyone has to have an opinion, and everyone has to have a say on what she should look like.
Well, guess what? Neither Julia nor Aleona give a tiny rat’s ass.
In a new video that Aleona posted on her YouTube channel, she’s seen shaving all of Julia’s hair off. Whether it’s a form of protest against the backlash her handiwork has received or simply an act of defiance against conventional beauty standards is unclear.
In an interview with Refinery29, Aleona comments, “It is just fashion; this is not for every day.”
“But I hope in [the] future…” she adds wistfully, leaving us only to wonder what she meant exactly.
If we can hazard a guess, though, it’s likely her hope that people will just learn how to leave women and their bodies—including their hair—alone.
[Refinery29]
Photo courtesy of Ghana Class
