What does your hair say about you? Sit back and relax as we explore the hidden meanings behind the blonde locks, impossibly unkempt manes, the elusive world of intricate braids, and many more. Although, before you read any further, I should warn you: what follows is not going to be a fluffy discourse on how your hairdo inherently means you like to be in charge, or have a propensity for tripping over things. Rather, by asking this variation of the age-old question 'what does your (fill in the blank) say about you', I intend to present a thoughtful discourse on why we need such categorical thinking to dictate who we are in the first place.

There's no denying that deriving some surface-level personality traits from one's physical traits makes sense, and is probably accurate to some extent. Drawing on the hair example: if a guy is sporting some style of a man bun, then its easy to assume with one glance that he owns a pair of sandals and can keep a hacky sack up in the air for at least 10 seconds. In truth, we can probably say with a certain amount of confidence that he does have some tendencies one would classify as "on the hippie side of hipster", if only based on the fact that historically, men with longer hair lived a little more liberal, outdoorsy lives than those with shorter hair. However, even if there is a correlation here, we have neither the authority or evidence to say that causation is at play. But since this image of a chaco-wearing skinny guy who gets everywhere by bike or sticking out his thumb on the side of a road and always has a joint on hand has been projected onto the man bun hairstyle by society, those who actually do match those traits will find themselves gravitating towards growing their hair out, subconsciously or intentionally.

And here in lies the fundamental problem with assigning people to arbitrary, socially-constructed categories: they change us into walking advertisements for a certain type of person, rather than allowing oneself to wear their hair however they like without it having effects on what they like to do, what their careers are, the music they listen to, etc. It's easy to say we don't let ourselves be affected by societal expectations, but the truth is, it happens everyday in ways that primarily go unnoticed. Leaning again on the hair phenomenon: what is the first thought you have when you see that a girl straightens her naturally wavy hair everyday? If it has ever been something along the lines of, "she's probably a little basic [a word which, by the way, we really need to get out of the habit of using]", then congratulations, you've been played by the forcefully persuasive delineations of social categories. Don't get me wrong, this is not something to be ashamed of. It's quite impossible to free ourselves entirely from judgement. But it is something we can try to catch ourselves on, and work toward becoming aware of how we subconsciously categorizing people based on certain chance characteristics.

So, what happens if we ask ourselves what our hair says about us in the future? I suppose many things could come from that, but in my opinion, the best case scenario is that the answer "I don't own a blowdryer" will finally be sufficient.