A harrowing dispatch from the front line of fringe-having.
She hadn’t asked, but I assured the girl washing my hair that I had thought this through. I wasn’t going through a separation, I hadn’t lost my job, and I wasn’t approaching anything else that would normally predicate a crisis fringe. Sure, I was about to turn 34 the next day, which meant I’d be one year away from a geriatric womb, but it’s not like I am one to lose sleep worrying about the statistical possibility of my non-existent children and what their future will be when the present is already a horror show of war crimes, AI slop and climate disaster. Not moi!
In fact, it’s been about two years now that I’ve been folding up the front of my hair like a roller blind to simulate a dummy fringe, before sprinting out into the lounge and saying “does this look weird” to my husband Joe, who would always say “looks good 🙂” even when it objectively looked like a judge’s wig. When I got sick of his supportive responses, I turned to experimenting with digital technologies, manically drawing fringes onto photos of myself, cutting and pasting small blocks of my own hair to my forehead and creating some pretty challenging mock-ups.
It’s hard to know the precise origins of my fringe frenzy. Perhaps it goes back to this photo of Emily Perkins, or maybe the fact that I haven’t gone a day without seeing a photo of Taylor Swift since mid-2022. Outside of aesthetics, fringes denote a certain kind of allure and mystery that I am deeply lacking as someone who writes malarkey like this on the internet. There also appears to be a correlation between fringes and creativity – see also Rachael King and Liz Stokes – which suggests the extra hair may keep the brain warmer and the ideas more insulated.
I’d be lying if I didn’t say there was some toxic motivation at play here too. I wrote about Botox earlier this year and took myself in for a consult over the course of reporting. That’s when I was made acutely aware of my “strong” forehead line, my “short” corrugator and my so-called “differently shaped” eyebrows. After it was published, I had several women tell me that they have a fringe instead of Botox. On the one hand, there’s no denying that this still upholds the same secrecy and invisibility of ageing in women as Botox does. On the other hand: I wanted it.
All these competing fringe-based desires have been wholly accelerated by the algorithm in more recent months. It began with the release of The Materialists in June, which hurtled Dakota Johnson and her various Ellen owns and lime lies back into my timeline, along with her powerfully perfect fringe. The Bicentennial Men at Instagram must have sensed me linger, and subsequently started serving me up an endless smorgasbord of similarly fringed celebrities like Alison Brie, Rashida Jones, Zooey Deschanel, Jameela Jamil and Penelope Cruz.
Among the stars also emerged oodles of fringed influencers, uniformly flouncing around on a cobbled street somewhere in Europe to ‘Nice to Each Other’. They smiled and tousled their tresses in capri pants, baker boy hats, giant blazers and all manner of clothing combinations that would make anyone else look like they were playing the chocolate game at a kids’ party. One of them was so aggressively chic that she wore most of her clothes backwards. Their fringes all parted slightly in the middle, cascading elegantly into long layers around the face.
Pair all of this with the fact that every New Zealand comedian I follow spent the last month at the Edinburgh FRINGE festival, and you are left with a truly lethal algorithmic combo. One afternoon I picked up the phone, made the booking, screenshotted roughly 40,000 examples, and screwed my courage to the sticking place (my forehead). When I arrived for the appointment, another lass with a perfect French girl fringe and my EXACT SAME glasses was working at the desk. Whack an Olivia Dean song over the montage – this was clearly meant to be.
Alas, my brain soon went into blackout mode to try to protect itself from the bad memories to come. One moment I was getting my hair washed, insisting that everything was fine, and then suddenly I came to and had sopping wet Dwight Schrute bangs. The hairdresser cooed “how are you feeling” and I simply said “I am freaking out” (Smeagol voice) followed by “keep going” (Gollum voice). So she continued to chop away, barrel drying the fringe to buggery, and I walked out with a bouncy fresh lid that was sticking straight up like the Statue of Liberty’s crown by the time I made it to me car.
Let’s record-scratch the Olivia Dean right now, because the fringe looked exactly like Garth from Wayne’s World. I took a photo and sent it to my immediate circle. Joe replied “looks good 🙂” as Jin rang scream-laughing her head off. I pulled out my water bottle and performed a Nalgene© baptism on myself, praying to Emily Perkins that it would weigh the fringe down before I drove to meet another friend, Sinead, for a drink. I was literally and figuratively wigging out as I hurtled through a red light in the CBD while screaming the words “I NEED POMADE” down the phone.
What happened next was truly remarkable. Sinead held an incredible amount of space for me at the bar as I constantly got distracted by my own reflection and made deep, guttural groans. In the days that followed, the fringe community wrapped their arms around me in what was either a tremendous act of generosity or a “one of us, one of us” frenzy because someone else had finally decided to join them in hell. Regardless, I was bombarded with a plethora of advice around gizmos and gadgets to tame the fringe, including velcro rollers, Dyson airwraps and rounded brushes that I do not have.
It’s been less than a week and I can confidently say that this is one of the worst decisions I have ever made in my life, purely based on the required admin alone. If you are considering a fringe, I recommend first taping a Tamagotchi to your forehead in order to adapt to the level of maintenance usually required for rare orchids and those dogs that you need to put sunblock on every day. Can you cope with checking in the mirror several times an hour to see if your Tamagotchi (fringe) needs feeding (product), discipline (hair straightener), or to be killed (beanie)?
What hurts even more than the fact that I start every day looking like baby Joe Dirt and end every day with the greasy slut strands of The Crow is how the algorithm turned on me almost immediately. She who once so generously led me down this garden path with Dakota et al now ladles on nothing but sneering fringe remorse memes. There’s the obvious ones, like the frog with a bowl cut musing “when you realise that getting bangs was not the answer to your problems” but the sophisticated trolling has even infiltrated my daily cute dog videos and lion news updates.
Still, there’s a comfort in knowing that I am not alone. Michelle Obama regrets her mid-life crisis bangs, and even Beyonce didn’t listen when her mum begged her not to get a fringe. There are countless articles about why the French effortless fringe is a total scam, whether you should get a fringe or go to therapy, and how this all relates to broader narratives around women on the verge. And the most twisted thing of all is that, for a brief 10-minute window every day, I actually love the way it looks and I can’t imagine my forehead leaking its secrets out ever again.
“Now you’ll always suffer,” sagely advised one of my fringed friends. “Because you’ll never be happy with a fringe and you’ll never be happy without one.”
