Your Worst Hair Decision

[Roses-at-dawn]

Colored intensly in highschool, and I still have some fried ends.

[cubancurlie]

Picking up straighteners at age 14/15 and using them regularly, even when I ran out of heat protectant, in order to stop my curls “ruining” my fringe and long hair. Very happy now with my curly fringe flourishing.

[NicoleLionne]

Voted for layers. The worst ones were definitely when I still had long hair (16-17). My hair looked like a staircase from the back, it was awful.

My current layers were really lovely when it was still a short bob. But they are such a pain to grow out, much worse than my bangs.

I just realized that the truly worst thing I have ever done to my hair is backpacking through Australia for 10 months, only using cheap shampoo and conditioner (and using too little of the latter) and letting it loose all the time (even when swimming in the ocean). I took meticulous care of my skin, but completely ignored my hair. After that I had to cut it short, it was so damaged that it would just snap off.

[Fimu]

Before going curly: straightening with flat-irons without knowing about proper heat protection

Since my curly years: too often clarifying without enough pre-pooing, using extremely pH treatments (Malibu C, shiakai, ApHogee 2-step), not paying enough attention to the pH of my hair products (some styling gels have a too high pH). I also wonder whether henna has roughened/stiffened my coarse hair even though I gained the most length when my hair was mainly hennaed, but back then my routine involved more oils.

[0xalis]

I voted bangs and color.

Bangs: 7th grade, had a super cute emo long-bangs pixie. Randomly decided to cut my bangs??? Regretted that immediately, then tried to make it more emo again by cutting the bangs diagonally. What a nightmare...

Color: 10th grade, decided to bleach my hair with dollar store bleach. Couldn't get it light enough because my ends were leftover black dye. Bleached several times over the course of a month. Fried my hair unrepairably (olaplex was not a thing at the time, not as far as I knew at least) opted for a pixie. Hated that pixie too.

Recently my biggest regret is just not trimming away my layers sooner. My hair looked so ridiculous before the bob...

[Raiwen]

Layers! About 3 years ago I've grown out my hair somewhere to the middle of my back, a bit longer, and I just wanted to give it some bounce and a couple shorter strands to make it flow nicely, but the hairdresser cut into my hair really deep, not paying attention of where to layers will fall. Some of the shortest pieces were in the middle of my hair in back. It was so bad I chopped it all off to my shoulders couple days after that.

[Siv]

Bahaha apparently I voted "fringe/bangs" in this poll at some point in the past, and I just posted in another thread about how I love my new quarantine bangs

Well, last time I cut bangs the hair dresser first cut "choppy layers" i.e. one chunk of hair was BSL and the other chunk was MBL - not gradual at all. And the bangs were ridiculously thick to start with, so I lost quite a bit of ponytail circumference, and then he styled them with a round brush so that they defied gravity, sort of like this but honestly way worse:

[sipnsun]

Going for the 'Rachel" haircut when Friends became hugely popular. Not only did every other woman in my area have that cut, it didn't suit my fine, thin, straight hair at all. It was horribly choppy and the razor cutting ruined my hair.

[Bat]

Going black to silver that was bad enough but I shaved it all off then months later I started bleaching again you can imagine how well that went lol a year later half my hair snapped off

[Ashtaroth]

Worst of the 80s: Spiral perm circa 1989. Took 4 hours, cost $$$, most of it fell out of my heavy hair almost immediately and what curl did stick around (bangs and front layers) looked dumb as my poker straight roots grew out.
Worst of the 90s: Let a fellow university student cut my hair from APL to a bad pixie
After that I mostly just stuck with hair dye experiments. None were overly tragic. :-)