Update: My friend said my hair wasn't thick

[chen bao jun]

I can't find the original thread, which I posted sometime last year. One of my friends was annoying me, saying she couldn't see why I 'thought' I had thick hair because my bun was so small. She was quite obnoxious and kept questioning me about it. Anyway, some time has passed the other day we met at the gym and she asked to try to put a claw clip in my hair. After she touched my hair, she was like, 'my goodness your hair IS really thick.' She did get the claw clip in by not putting all my hair into it. She also said that my bun is not small anymore (its the same size as hers now, though she has about a foot longer hair) and that she notices that my hair has grown a great deal since I started trying to grow it (two years ago). She said that to her it looked as if I would be at waist (stretched) in a year. I think it will be more like two years, actually.
It was quite a turnaround, I was surprised but pleased.
It seems that she really was confused by the thick hair, small bun phenomenon that we always talk about on this thread, and was also confused thinking my hair just looked thick because it's so curly, because curly hair often looks thicker than it is. But when she tried to gather it up into a claw clip and felt it, she did realize there was actually a lot there, it' s not imagination. She's always been someone who is willing to admit she's wrong--but she wants proof that she IS wrong and gets very insistent. In general, she doesn't like people to lie to themselves, and I guess she thought I was. It's an interesting personality type.
Anyway, that's my update.
She IS a friend, not a random person making remarks (which is even less okay) but I wonder if sometimes random people make the hurtful remarks that we talk about on this thread not to be mean so much as because its their honest (though unsolicited and unwanted) opinion.
I'm glad I didn't get affected by her in the beginning (when she not only was sure that my hair wasn't thick but was also pretty clear that she was sure it was not going to grow long).

[meteor]

I guess I'm lucky, it didn't happen to me as in people saying things that may sound mean but aren't.
The worst I experienced was bossiness, telling me that I "should" do this or that with my hair: e.g. when I wore it down, I was told I should do intricate updos, and now that I wear it up, that I should wear it down, or that hair longer than BSL isn't "normal looking"... stuff like that, which isn't really major.

I am often told that I must be wearing extensions (which I've never done myself, even though I think they are fun) or that not all of my hair is "real", which I understand, because I have ombre highlights that really show in braids/updos, so I don't consider that to be a mean comment, it's probably just a normal reaction to seeing variation in color and thick braids.

Some people (and they weren't even children!) touched my hair or even pulled it, which I didn't like but I let it be because I honestly don't think they were deliberately mean, I think people consider hair to be your accessory so they touch it the same way they might touch your bag or hat. Not super-polished behaviour but not the end of the world either. :)

[two_wheels]

chen bao jun, that's really cool that she backed down once reality kicked in!

meteor that's very tolerant of you about the hair-pulling. Not sure what I'd do in that situation.

Someone decided to inform me that my hair was thin the other day. With a pitying look. I nearly told them my ponytail circumference to prove to them that it is exactly in the middle of medium, but managed to stop before outing myself, so to speak! My bun is tiny and I don't care what you think :whistle:

[Loviatar]

Two wheels, I get that from people... "Your hair is so thin" - actually it's FINE, with a circumference of over 4 inches, I think you'll find it's thick.

Too many people confuse fine with thin and coarse with thick. I have a friend with super coarse curly hair which is actually in the I hair classification, but our friends rave about her 'thick' curls. What they mean is that she has tons of volume. It compacts down to very little.

Chen, that's good news :)

[chen bao jun]

Two wheels, your bun is definitely not tiny and as your hair grows it will get bigger and bigger.
Loviatar, my friend originally was better informed, i guess than your friends. She must have run into someone like your other friend with the coarse curly hair and lots of volume who compacts down to very little, since she is actually low density. what my friend kept saying to me initially was that I must be mistaking volume for density because I do have that hairtype (very coarse and curly) and I suppose the size of my bun made it seem to her as if it must be low density when compacted. However, when she felt my hair, she realized that I really am high density--and graciously retracted her previous statement.
I know several people on your side of the fence, who can't convince people they have a lot of hair because they don't have volume (being high density but with fine hair, on the straighter side). I guess the lesson is that most people just simply have no clue. And definitely people have no clue of bun size! I kept trying to tell my friend that I had extremely thick hair when I had no bun at all because my hair was short. So it's not just your bun size. those days are actually not that long ago. when I first came to LHC two years ago, I could not make a bun. I wore either crown braids or a claw clip that was mostly filled with scrunchie (which was holding my hair in a kind of ponytail ) that first year, because my hair was short (just a little below shoulder stretched) but I still did have a lot of density. I'm glad she gets this now--but wonder why so many people have this urge to classify--why they care so much about someone else's head.

[LongHairLesbian]

Haha I had an experience the other day that, funnily enough, is the exact opposite Chen's. A customer I was serving at work saw my bun and said that I must have thick hair based on my bun size, but she only thought that because she thought I had "average" length hair. When I told her that I actually have average density hair, but it goes down to almost hip length, she was surprised. Then she told me I should wear it down, because it's impressive to have such long hair. I thanked her and said I like having it down around the house, but it's less distracting to have it up at work, and looks more professional in a bun. She agreed that it looked professional. She was a nice lady. :D Glad your friend came to her senses, Chen.

[chen bao jun]

Thanks LHL. interesting that she assumed your hair was thick, not long.

[torrilin]

I think a lot of it is human nature. We want to think of ourselves as right, and it can be really hard to admit how much you don't know.

Something to keep in mind is that while the thickness categories we use are fairly useful, the median peak in most hair surveys I've seen is right around 3.5-4.5", and between that and the way circle area works, there's a fair bit of justification for a iv category. I think both factors can affect how people perceive another person's hair.

LHL, people often think I have "normal" hair too, as long as it's past waist. In reality, it's fine and about a 3" ponytail, and at BSL my buns are tiny. My current around tailbone length is not something anyone would pick for me unless they *know* just how long my hair is or are very good at "reading" braid length. Since my bun isn't huge, and my braids don't look like anything special, I don't get a lot of attention for my hair in public. I like that. I'm pretty introverted, and I'd hate to have people touch me in public or pull my hair.

[meteor]

Well said, torrilin. And yes, the only way to guarantee almost no attention and no unwanted touching is keeping it all up in a bun.

I think others (even professional hairdressers) can never know your hair as well as you know it, so who cares what people say?
I asked multiple hairdressers about my individual strand thickness and could never get a straight answer, sometimes they'll say "fine" then change to "coarse" a minute later! Often people make judgement without knowing what they are talking about: and I've never seen a person dig out their microscope to analyze hair before passing a quick judgement on skin, hair or whatever else they are talking about.

Also, many people with hair too short to bun don't even know that super-thick, super-long hair can be seriously compacted into a small bun - especially when you need it for sports. Some short-haired people reacted to me putting hair up as if it was a magic trick, and my hair is only TBL. Since they don't know that hair can be squeezed and compressed so much, they can't imagine buns hiding huge manes. So thinking that someone's thick hair is thin is not really being "mean", it's just being uninformed.

[chen bao jun]

I'm probably oversensitive, too. Since I was a little girl, people have paid so much attention to my hair (both good and bad attention) that others just mentioning the subject makes me antsy. yet it is also something I obsess like crazy about.
I myself didn't know very much about buns before coming on LHC.--and growing enough hair to have one.
I really thought it was a 'bun' when you put your hair up in a ponytail holder of some sort and pin the ends down in a circular fashion around it to simulate (sort of) what a bun looks like. I never knew anyone who wore a bun (except my grandmother in my home country) as it was not a popular hairstyle while I was growing up (except for 'topknots' for a brief period during the the 1970's). Of course I saw them in movies--but they were always fake, I'm sure.
the older ladies I knew wore 'buns' that were pieces pinned to their hair, too. I thought their hair was short because they pinned a bun piece over on top of their brushed back hair and that that mine was long because I could use my own hair to make a facsimile, lol.
Looking at 'buns' on youtube, my opinions were pretty mainstream, its only LHCers you see doing actual buns. And mostly the ones with so much hair that you would think that ALL buns were head-eating.

[sourgrl]

This was me regarding my own hair before LHC. Now I know better, I have alot of fine hair :)


Two wheels, I get that from people... "Your hair is so thin" - actually it's FINE, with a circumference of over 4 inches, I think you'll find it's thick.

Too many people confuse fine with thin and coarse with thick. I have a friend with super coarse curly hair which is actually in the I hair classification, but our friends rave about her 'thick' curls. What they mean is that she has tons of volume. It compacts down to very little.

Chen, that's good news :)

[YamaMaya]

I guess I'm lucky, it didn't happen to me as in people saying things that may sound mean but aren't.
The worst I experienced was bossiness, telling me that I "should" do this or that with my hair: e.g. when I wore it down, I was told I should do intricate updos, and now that I wear it up, that I should wear it down, or that hair longer than BSL isn't "normal looking"... stuff like that, which isn't really major.

I am often told that I must be wearing extensions (which I've never done myself, even though I think they are fun) or that not all of my hair is "real", which I understand, because I have ombre highlights that really show in braids/updos, so I don't consider that to be a mean comment, it's probably just a normal reaction to seeing variation in color and thick braids.

Some people (and they weren't even children!) touched my hair or even pulled it, which I didn't like but I let it be because I honestly don't think they were deliberately mean, I think people consider hair to be your accessory so they touch it the same way they might touch your bag or hat. Not super-polished behaviour but not the end of the world either. :)

Seriously? I wouldn't say pulling someone's hair is acceptable whether it's real or not. I really don't know what goes through some people's heads. If someone dared pull my hair I think I just might punch them as hard as I could.