Hellobee

My coworker was talking about something that would happen at my 3 month mark post-partum, and then casually threw in, “You know, when all your hair starts to fall out.” I had decided early on in my pregnancy that I would donate all the hair I had accumulated before it began falling out in droves, but now I knew I had at least a couple months of a buffer to get out of the house and actually do it with a newborn on the scene. I usually grow my hair pretty long, and then cut it short, and grow it out again. Sometimes I look back at photos and I balk at the length of my hair because it almost looks like something that should be on a horse. Case in point, this prom-esquely posed photo after my husband and I graduated university.

At about that 3 month mark I realized my now-wayward hairs were becoming a hazard for creating invisible tourniquets on my baby’s fingers and toes, so I made an appointment at Gene Juarez. I decided I wanted either a pixie cut if the stylist thought I could pull it off, or something I could still put in a ponytail for dance. She asked tentatively if I’d ever had a pixie cut before, to which I said no. She thought long and hard about my hairline, my thickness of hair at the hairline, and played with my hair for a bit before she decided that she probably didn’t want to be the author of possibly the worst hair cut of my life. She politely chalked it up to, “You say you just want something that’s wash and wear, and a pixie cut will require some work each day.”

I went away with perhaps not the best short hair cut I’ve ever had, but it was alright. I think my stylist was playing it very conservative, because maybe they get nervous when they see a girl come in with super long hair that wants it chopped off?

Locks for Love is typically what comes to mind when you think of donating hair, but I was surprised to read that they don’t necessarily help children with cancer like I had thought. The wigs are for children with permanent hair loss, which often excludes hair loss from chemotherapy because it is not permanent. They sell many of the wigs on a sliding scale cost instead of freely giving them. It also seems like they actually make very few wigs relative to the donations, and that they are positively inundated with ponytails that they end up selling for $3 a piece. So the Pantene Beautiful Lengths program sounded like a great alternative, and the wigs would actually go toward cancer patients.

Here’s a basic run down of what to do. I had my stylist cut the donation before the actual hair cut, and she sectioned off my hair into three different pony tails.

Did anyone else donate hair after your baby was born?