The action of bleaching your head and giving yourself a DIY buzzcut at 3 a.m. in a bathroom mirror while bawling your eyes out because you finished the emotional ending of a TV series isn’t in itself negative; it’s how you view the action that determines its sanctity. We treat these moments like breakdowns, but really they’re just transformations — and hair, unlike pain, grows back.

Creative expression shouldn’t be chastised just because the artist was emotional while ideating — hair is a canvas, and is one of the most immediate and visible tools to express how we feel. Art is often emotional by nature. Whether that be through the use of colors or textures, art can influence one’s mood. 

Everyone should change their appearance at least once and shouldn’t be wary of change just because it’s associated with a crash out — which is really just an alternative healthy coping mechanism.

Whatever journey you’re on, it’s a good one. If you cut off five inches of your hair and dyed it a raspberry-magenta shade of pink, like myself, it could have been the best choice for yourself at that moment.

For example, color theory suggests that green represents new beginnings, while soft textures evoke tranquility. Doing a novice deep conditioning treatment, then dyeing your hair forest green could be stimulating enough to inspire calming rejuvenation, and it could be the best coping mechanism to let a suppressed emotion see the light. 

Suppressing emotions doesn’t make them go away: They build up over time and may erupt or cause a crutch of unhealthy detachment. It’s better to express how you feel through something so integral to your identity — your physical appearance — than allow it to bottle up and degrade your mental health further.

Impulsivity isn’t such a bad thing. The only way you can learn from mistakes is to make them — regret fades faster than we expect, and it strengthens your feeling of self-assurance. 

Even if the haircut or dye job yields a perceived catastrophic result, you will learn a valuable lesson regardless: Life is about experiences, and feeling insecure about one’s hypothetical choppy microbangs is a fleeting sensation, so dwelling in regret is futile. 

Maybe you’ll start reciting daily affirmations or, oppositely, grow accustomed to a lack of compliments and realize that true acceptance comes from within. While cutting your hair could have been to distract yourself, once thrust into an uncomfortable situation — a repetitive bad hair day — aversion will no longer be an option and internal reflection will be inevitable.

Even if you don’t consider yourself an artist, getting a fresh start by changing your appearance can be a form of self-care. Striving to be a better version of yourself by achieving the hair color you’ve saved on Pinterest and contemplated for years is healing. 

Beauty standards often reward playing it safe, but in reality, this risk management only guarantees stagnation. Hair is one of the few areas where changes carry low stakes, yet high emotional return. Not every decision is a productive one, and cutting or dyeing your hair poorly may be surmountable in some cases, but at its worst will still be a temporary state. 

Hair follicles go through a three-stage life cycle. During the last of the phases, telogen, the hair follicle rests until it restarts its growth process and pushes old hair through the scalp to reveal new hair. If altering the hair strands you had during a time of emotional strife helps to relinquish the pain of the past, then so be it; hair grows back, so it isn’t a permanent alteration.

It’s unrealistic to assume that someone will like the same things their entire life. If you feel distant from your current aesthetic, there is no tangible rule against making a change. At the end of the day, obsessing over phantom pressures to maintain consistency rather than defining for yourself who you are in a given moment stunts development.

We live in an image-oriented society where so much emphasis is placed on beauty, and social safety depends on not rocking the boat; our hair is a part of our personal “brand,” and impulsive changes are treated like personal crises rather than self-expression. Giving up your own happiness as an opportunity cost to receive more Instagram likes is feeble-minded and shallow.

Art is subjective, meaning not everyone is going to understand or agree with the choices made by the artist. It doesn’t mean the piece is hideous or invaluable. Choosing to embrace a manic episode and drastically change your appearance via hair alterations is not imprudent; it’s admirable experimentation by a visionary: yourself. 

It takes immense bravery to not only plunge head-on into change with your own two hands, but first to recognize the painfully consuming emotions you have. When you factor in the reality that you were able to turn said agony into something positively imaginative, only one fact remains: Crashing out and cutting your hair may have been necessary and was indubitably brilliant.

Sophia Ainsworth is a sophomore writing about the underbelly and evolution of the beauty industry in her column “Fairest of Them All,” which runs every other Wednesday.