How Do You Know When It’s Time To Change Your Hairstyle?

Change is good, or so goes the saying. Change is also scary. When it comes to those areas in our lives that don’t require mandatory change, we can find that we are really stuck in a rut.

It’s not as if we have a buzzer that goes off telling us that it’s time to switch it up and do something different with our hair. Besides the fact that there’s no real indicator for changing our hair, we have most time fallen into our current styles by default anyway. That default setting makes it even easier to leave things be.

Think about it this way, do you go in and change the default settings on your microwave, or your oven or even your cell phone? For the most part, the answer is no. You just don’t do things that cause disruption unless there’s reason to because who likes to disturb the flow of something that works. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Right?

Well, yes and no. The thing is this, your hairstyle might be broken and you just don’t know it. Or maybe you know it, but you aren’t aware of how bad it needs changing. It’s not like people you encounter on a daily basis will every approach you and say that your hair needs to be different than it is. That just doesn’t happen. You’ll have to take it upon yourself to decide if it’s time to change hairstyles.

How you came to wear your current style is a very good starting point. When you examine this, you will come up with info that will point to things like whether your current style is outdated, not practical anymore or something you don’t even like that much.

If you wear the style you wear because that’s how your college roommate did it that one time she gave you a makeover, that’s a pretty good sign that you need to at least reevaluate things. Maybe after a thorough evaluation, you will come to keep the current look, but maybe not.

The style you wear today may have worked for you before you had kids, a husband, and a demanding boss. Now that you do have those things in your life, however, maybe the style that took you an hour and a half to perfect every morning is no longer sensible for you to pretend to keep up. Even when you think you’re pulling it off, it’s probable that everyone knows you haven’t truly styled your hair in over 4 months because you just don’t have the time.

The time it takes to mentally walk through if it is time to change hairstyles is less time than an episode of Insecure takes to run. Give it a few minutes and think about a couple important factors.

First, do you genuinely like the hairstyle you wear on a regular basis? If you were sitting in the waiting room of a doctor’s office and you thumbed through a magazine and saw your current hairstyle, would you stop and go ‘Oh yeah! I love this style?’ If the answer is no, start there. Think about what you do and don’t like about the hairstyle you rock and maybe all it’ll take is a tweak for you to come up with something you’re truly happy wearing.

Next, consider your lifestyle and all that it requires for you to successfully navigate a day in your world. Does long hair work for you only because you keep it in a ponytail 95% of the time? Would you rather wear it styled, but you don’t because of the stress of actually curling every day? Then maybe a bob would work. It could be an opportunity to wear a real hairstyle, but still, it would be practical because you could wrap it at night and simply comb it down in the morning. Truth be told, a bob beats a ‘mom’ ponytail any day of the week.

Where do you work? Are you in a corporate environment that calls for you to look professional in a traditional sense? If that’s why you wear a low bun 5 days a week, you should know that there are other options that work for work, but that will give you a little leeway to jazz things up.

The dead giveaway that always means it’s time to change your hairstyle is if it makes you look like you have a tape of 90’s rap in your car. Dated hairstyles and hair styling methods keep you from feeling fresh and vibrant.

Look for styles similar to yours on television and in print. If you don’t see any, it doesn’t automatically mean your style is old, but do consider that it may mean that. Drop into a local salon and ask for a free consultation. Ask the stylist for an honest evaluation and talk to them about your lifestyle and what you want in a hairstyle. Discuss things like the ones listed above family, work, time constraints, etc.