Home / Beauty Tips / Any idiot can learn to braid hair – cutting it is a skill | Bim Adewunmi

Any idiot can learn to braid hair – cutting it is a skill | Bim Adewunmi

I have always been an astute assessor of my skills. Around the age of 10, for example, I discovered my soprano, and promptly tried out for the choir. That ability has since fallen away but for a good while, I rocked school concerts. Other talents: meeting the parents, speedy dishwashing, making a perfect cup of tea. The corresponding inverse of this is a mostly accurate ability to gauge what I am bad at: drawing, perfectly winged eyeliner, cutting my own hair. But a few weeks ago – first time ever – I attempted the latter. Afterwards, I wanted to beat my own chest. Do your worst, world! I feel invincible.

I am a great believer in paying a fair price for an outsourced specialised skill. I do not pluck my eyebrows, for example, because my hand is notably unsteady, I am overzealous, and $7 is a reasonable price to pay a nice lady to thread them. The same principle applies to the hair on my head. For years, I had it relaxed every eight weeks like clockwork, until I went natural and slowly acquainted myself with my long-forgotten texture. Any idiot can learn to braid; hair cutting is a learned skill. Perhaps years of experimenting with my afro had slowly been feeding me some seeds of recklessness. So I bought some shears. Hair is already dead, I repeated to myself like a sixth-form philosopher-poet, as I fired up YouTube and watched 12 tutorials in a row. I parted my hair. I made the first snip… and the sky did not fall.

The result is a little uneven, sure. But in six weeks’ time, I’m going to try again. Maybe I can become good at something else.

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