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"  The lady at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport was having a bad day. One suspects that many days in the life of a TSA employee aren&amp;#039;t all that great to begin with, but this woman, a mean-looking, Momma-from-Precious type checking IDs in the security line, was giving off especially bad vibes. I handed her my driver&amp;#039;s license and suddenly, out of nowhere, she smiled. &amp;quot;Go ahead, Richard, with your good-looking head of hair.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Oh, thank you,&amp;quot; I said, returning the smile and running a hand through my bangs. (Yes, bangs. Stay with me here.) She handed back my ID, still smiling and maintaining eye contact... with my hair. She wasn&amp;#039;t through. &amp;quot;God, that is fabulous hair. Is it real?&amp;quot; I nodded, nervous about where she was going with this, and then she nodded, satisfied. I moved along, and as I kicked off my shoes, I looked behind me. She was back to scowling. I&amp;#039;m not saying I made her day or anything. But it is entirely possible, particularly since some variation of this event has been happening, on and off, my entire life, that my hair \u2014 red and shiny like a new penny, and at the time of this incident, a twelve-car pileup of curls and waves and, yes, bangs \u2014 struck her in some small way.  Good hair can do that. Most men of drinking age tend to rely on a first-do-no-harm approach at the barber, but if I learned nothing else from growing out my hair over nine months, from a crew cut to a mane with some weight and dimension and stank to it, it&amp;#039;s that trying something new with your hair \u2014 making it not just good but better \u2014 can make all the difference in the world.  Some background: For years I&amp;#039;ve paid a guy fifteen bucks a month to buzz my hair high and tight, mostly because the shorter I kept it, the less shit I&amp;#039;d hear about it. But then my son was born last year and I let it go a little, and I got to talking with Esquire&amp;#039;s grooming guru, Rodney Cutler, about what would happen if I stopped cutting it altogether. Rodney, a firecracker of a man, volunteered to help me manage the growth. He explained that no one should just grow out his hair. You&amp;#039;ll grow a mullet, or an Afro, or something you probably weren&amp;#039;t looking to grow, and you&amp;#039;re better off if your barber periodically cleans up the edges while your top and sides grow out. So that&amp;#039;s what we did. For nine long months, I stopped by Rodney&amp;#039;s salon, and he would take a little off and talk me through the mental growing pains. It was kind of like going to a shrink. We&amp;#039;d talk about my insecurities and frustrations and expectations and what it all meant. Like: Nobody trusts a man who constantly changes his haircut. (See: Tom Brady.) But there is nothing wrong with setting aside notions about what is, and is not, your kind of thing. That&amp;#039;s why I allowed Rodney&amp;#039;s team to chemically straighten my hair around month four. This process entailed a buff guy from Staten Island &amp;quot;painting&amp;quot; my hair with a relaxing agent, outfitting me with a transparent shower cap, and parking me in the middle of a salon for what seemed like six hours. One blowout and two days of not washing my hair later, I looked as shellacked and menacing as a TV weatherman. I hated it, mostly because I didn&amp;#039;t look like me, and I realized that whatever issues I had with my hair, there was only so much I&amp;#039;d be willing to do to change it. I learned other things, too. Like everyone looks younger with longer hair. And that it&amp;#039;s impossible to look pulled together with curly hair. And that the sense of control in our daily lives is, at best, an illusion. About five months in, my hair started to behave strangely, curling and bouncing and falling in outrageous ways. Every morning, I&amp;#039;d spend more minutes than I&amp;#039;m comfortable admitting sampling an arsenal of hair products. I would pull and massage my hair in all different directions to get the desired effect. Some days it worked. Some days it didn&amp;#039;t. It was gonna do what it was gonna do, and I just had to accept it.  Today, for the first time in a long time \u2014 years, maybe \u2014 I feel good about my hair. Scratch that: I feel great about my hair. I look at it once a day, in the morning, and I use one product (Kiehl&amp;#039;s Malleable Molding Paste). What seemed at times like a narcissistic, borderline-embarrassing pre-midlife crisis \u2014 how many times can a man say &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t touch Daddy&amp;#039;s hair&amp;quot; and still call himself a man? \u2014 grew, literally, into a whole new way of thinking about myself. Not everyone has the time or money to go to the likes of Rodney to help them manage the growth. Nor does everyone have the interest: Most of us figured out our haircuts in high school and we&amp;#039;re happy with them. But I believe that every man should do something new and different with his hair at least once, while he&amp;#039;s still got it. You might like it, or you might hate it, but either way, you&amp;#039;ll know where you stand, and if other people don&amp;#039;t like it, they can go straight to hell. If there&amp;#039;s a better lesson to teach my son, I don&amp;#039;t know it.  Red, in case you&amp;#039;re wondering. His hair is red. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/style/grooming/a11031/growing-hair-out-men-1011/>