Getting Bangs Really Isn't That Deep

Earlier this spring, needs-no-introduction icon Rihanna and I, a lowly fashion and beauty editor, had the exact same thought at roughly the same time: Maybe I should get bangs.

I don’t know why the Fenty mogul debuted blunt, blonde bangs in April. I can only speak for myself. What feels like my entire Instagram feed and half of Hollywood has recently gone the fringe route, convincing me by sheer exposure to join in.

Here's a long, but non-exhaustive, list of celebrities who've chopped their hair straight across their foreheads and persuaded me to book a haircut in the process. Zendaya clipped in bangs to her honey-gold ponytail for a stop on the Challengers tour in London. Julia Roberts and Anne Hathaway added feathery fringe to their long, brunette curls for recent press, while Kerry Washington, Ashley Graham, and Sydney Sweeney tried bangs of various textures and lengths at the 2024 Met Gala. (Sweeney's, we know now, was a wig.) At the Cannes Film Festival last week, Michelle Yeoh arrived on the carpet with fresh blonde bangs to complement her off-the-runway Balenciaga outfit. Selena Gomez also appeared at Cannes with long curtain bangs brushed and curled on either side of her red carpet ponytail.

It's not just celebrities who are into the face-framing cut. Hairstylists and online beauty outlets are calling spring the season of “Bardot bangs.” When I eventually went to Davida Salon on Manhattan's Upper East Side to try them for myself (and, however dubiously, for journalism), my stylist told me “everyone” is coming for appointments with bang inspiration images in tow.

Bangs are having enough of a moment that they made me wonder if celebrities can beat the worst allegations against them for good. You've heard the jokes: When someone gets bangs, certain corners of pop culture say, there's something wrong with the person who got them. Or, they're grounds for immediate regret. In 2013, then-First Lady Michelle Obama referred to her bangs as a sign of a "midlife crisis." Then there's the titular Emily of Emily in Paris, who reacts to a breakup by whipping out her scissors and giving herself a haircut friends call “trauma bangs” for the rest of the latest season.

"Trauma bangs" as a term has wriggled its way everywhere from Cindy Crawford's haircut tests on Instagram to reviews of bang-trimming scissors on sites like The Strategist. In Funny Story, an Emily Henry romantic comedy at the top of the New York Times Best Sellers List this month, bangs are the butt of an offhand joke between the plucky protagonist and her coworker. "I get sick of having bangs four days after getting them," she says. “Well," her friend replies, "that’s everyone.”

Nearly as soon as I noticed a rise in bang haircuts, examples of their detractors started to play on a mental loop in my mind. I began to worry what getting bangs would silently convey, even though I genuinely wanted them. Would people look at my new haircut and think I was getting divorced or flailing professionally? Are bangs a harbinger of internal doom? If someone as poised as Michelle Obama once regretted her bangs, surely there was no hope for me loving mine.

Still, I crowdsourced on Instagram Stories for feedback from recent inductees into bang-wearing society before sitting down in the stylist's chair. Maybe if people outside Hollywood were actually getting them, and feeling good, I could be reassured.

Around thirty fashion colleagues and long-lost college classmates replied to my outreach, ready to gush over (and defend) their haircuts. A friend in Paris said she’d just gotten the chop and couldn’t imagine her face without it from the other side. Another in Washington, D.C. said her wife has grown to like her bangs even more than her previous hairstyle.

Fashion editor Cortne Bonilla describes the bangs she recently adopted as "a sign of me returning to my most authentic self." After growing them out over the Covid pandemic and her wedding, Bonilla looked in the mirror and didn't quite recognize who she saw. When she brought back her old haircut, bangs and all, a friend said she "looked like herself again."

Trauma or regret? A few respondents to my unofficial survey admitted they'd kept their intentions to get bangs a secret before the chop, worried that it would be interpreted as A Sign. But on the other side, the most out of pocket question one friend received was whether she meant to copy longtime bang-wearer Taylor Swift.

All those conversations reinforced what I was already hoping: Bangs really are just a haircut, not license for a sanity check. Why assume the chop is reactionary to begin with? There's only one inference to make when someone gets bangs: They like the style enough to wear it. And if they don't, they'll say so (and change it).

This isn't to say that bangs aren't always emotionless and trend-driven like they were in my case. Aura Friedman, a celebrity hair colorist and stylist I reached out to for extra bang advice, has shepherded clients like Zo? Kravitz and SooJoo Park through dramatic color and length changes. “Sometimes [a dramatic haircut] is a rebirth and reinvention,” she tells me. “We all deserve the grace to flow, evolve, and adjust. We also all deserve the grace of having the ability to express ourselves through hair, clothing, and fashion—it’s fun!”

I didn't necessarily need a rebirth, but I did feel confident enough in what I'd heard to get the haircut I wanted. So I eventually walked into the salon around the corner from my Manhattan apartment with a few reference images—Julia, Anne, Daisy Edgar Jones, Dakota Johnson—and a promise that I wouldn't let my stylist, Michelle, talk me out of it.

Any lingering worries were unnecessary: Michelle actually asked why I hadn't considered bangs sooner. By the end of our hour together, she'd sectioned, snipped, and blow-dried what was once long, side-parted hair into a medium-length cut with longer bangs that brushed the tops of my eyelids. I'm usually stone-faced in the salon chair, but I smiled at us both in the mirror the entire time. I liked how my bangs drew attention to my eyes, and how they complemented the '70s leaning nature of my D?en-dress filled, vintage-inspired wardrobe. How could I care if anyone thought this cut was the sign of a crisis? I was the one switching up my hair just for the thrill of it, and I was having fun.

It's been a few weeks since I first took stock of all the women getting bangs this spring and joined them. The reactions have been pretty positive, if I say so myself. My husband told me they're cute and my friends said they're a natural fit. If they're lying, they're doing it well.

My bangs aren't nearly as glossy as Rihanna's or evenly distributed as Anne Hathaway's. Some days, they're so unruly in the late-May wind that I have to pull them back with a headband. But when they cooperate, I love them. (All credit for good bang days belongs to my Dyson AirWrap and Crown Affair dry shampoo.) More importantly, I don't regret them a bit.

Beating any trauma allegations will take time, exposure, and a good attitude when people ask what possessed me to pick up the scissors—because they have, in fact, asked. When I FaceTimed my mom after my appointment, she said what every daughter with a new haircut hopes to hear: “Are you crazy?!” A not-unkind journalist across from me at a dinner last week also wondered if I got them because I "wanted a fresh start."

I could laugh it all off because I know bangs are not a sign of distress; they're a sign that I'm doing what I want with my hair. (And, maybe, that I'm a little gullible where celebrity trends are concerned.) It doesn't need to be deeper than that.