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"  My friend Alysia is blessed with truly enviable genes\u2014she&amp;#039;s a lithe 5&amp;#039;8&amp;quot;, 120 pounds, with long legs, a narrow rib cage, and swanlike neck. She also has beautiful, balanced features: a full mouth, large (but not googly) brown eyes, a patrician brow, and pale (but not pasty), wrinkle-free skin. She quite closely resembles a supermodel. In fact, it was only when I tried to figure out why, when she walks into a room, she hits the scene not as a bombshell (as her objective stats would suggest) but as an approachable, normal girl that I arrived at my ground-breaking socio-scientific theory. What stands between Alysia and instantly-sending-men-to-knees status? What makes her the hot librarian in the Hollywood stereotype before she whips off her glasses? One very small but significant detail: her hair.  Don&amp;#039;t get me wrong; Alysia&amp;#039;s mane is in line with the rest of her genetics\u2014glossy chestnut with natural ringlets. But &amp;quot;it has this tendency to, how can I explain it?&amp;quot; she moans. &amp;quot;...Triangulate.&amp;quot;  Every six months or so, Alysia, like many of us, decides she needs to update. She takes herself to Heart, a one-name hipster hair-dresser in New York City who works out of her Chelsea apartment and has given our way coolest friends their layered, insouciant sexpot manes. She does the same for Alysia. It lasts about four days.  One day I see her and she&amp;#039;s intimidatingly chic, and the next day my dear, familiar Alysia is back, her shoulder-length hair like that of a 1950s mom in a television drama, a modified curly pageboy. I have to refrain from teasing her after each cycle, because I know it&amp;#039;s the stringy-haired pot calling the curly-haired kettle black.  Alysia and I have the very same problem: We can&amp;#039;t conquer our hair set point.  It&amp;#039;s not you, it&amp;#039;s not your too thin/too curly/too thick/too straight hair, it&amp;#039;s not your lack of discipline (though those are factors)\u2014you&amp;#039;re fighting psychobiology: Human beings have a hair set point.  Most of you are probably aware of the weight set point. Biologists believe that bodies gravitate to a certain weight. It&amp;#039;s why most diets fail. When you&amp;#039;re 30 pounds over your set point, curb calories and your body easily sheds extra pounds. But when you near your set point, your body starts to cling to the weight, and your metabolism slows down. Some scientists say you can adjust your weight set point semipermanently, but that takes long-term discipline.  Here&amp;#039;s the thing: I think that although it should be easier to change your hairstyle than your weight, to make any permanent adjustments requires the same deep commitment, mental battles, and discipline. The hair set point is the style your hair ends up assuming over and over, with such determination that it seems to have a mind of its own. This style is partly due to genetics: Whether your hair flips up on the ends or curls under, where it parts, or if it&amp;#039;s beset with cowlicks, all -depends on your ancestry. Hair also has a limit to how long it will grow. &amp;quot;Each individual hair is predetermined to grow a certain amount per year and has a growing cycle that lasts a certain number of years, after which the hair falls out,&amp;quot; explains Philip -Kingsley, a trichologist (hair scientist) who runs clinics in New York City and London. &amp;quot;The average is a four-year growing cycle, with six inches a year. So the average person can grow their hair 24 inches but no longer.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s midback! But we can&amp;#039;t all be Crystal Gayle: &amp;quot;Metabolic factors can affect the cycle\u2014for instance, anemic women&amp;#039;s hair won&amp;#039;t fulfill its predetermined length,&amp;quot; Kingsley explains.  But after these physical limitations, the hair set point is psychological. People with short set points describe a kind of itchy feeling when their hair gets to a certain length. &amp;quot;I have to cut it,&amp;quot; says Celia, an ethics professor at the London Business School and a confirmed pixie-capper. &amp;quot;Sometimes that very day.&amp;quot; Women with long set points love the swingy, free feeling of a bob but after a week begin to go slightly insane if they can&amp;#039;t pull it back in a ponytail.  &amp;quot;Oh, absolutely,&amp;quot; confirms the Shah of the Shag, Sally Hershberger, when I tell her about my hair set point theory. Her own androgynous rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll set point, worn since the 1970s, give or take a few detours, is so powerful it compels perfectly rational people to pay $800 to get the same one. &amp;quot;People come to me to change their set points,&amp;quot; she explains. Hershberger takes credit for permanently adjusting Hillary Clinton. &amp;quot;Remember the bouffant? In 1998, I made it sleeker, more layered, and less poufy. She really hasn&amp;#039;t gone back.&amp;quot; Regardless of Clinton&amp;#039;s career wins, in my book a positive hair set point adjustment counts as a major victory.  For as long as I can remember, my hair has been a bangless, stringy, shoulder-length nonentity. It requires no upkeep because there is nothing to keep up. It&amp;#039;s simply as long as it grows. Every two or three years, I become determined to polish my image. I get a haircut, one that\u2014everyone universally agrees\u2014looks great on me: long bangs and a neck-length bob that swings forward \u00E0 la Vidal. But despite my best intentions, I&amp;#039;ve never made it past two update cuts.   &amp;quot;Revert to saved?&amp;quot; the little inner automaton who rules me asks. Yes! I click, relieved, once again, to be myself.  Which is, of course, the key to the set point. All the women I interviewed uttered the same phrase: &amp;quot;It just feels like me.&amp;quot; It follows that what feels most like you reveals truths about who you really are. There&amp;#039;s an old chestnut floating around that people always go back to the haircut they had in high school. Paul Fussell, in his seminal humor book Class, about American hierarchies, claims that keeping college hair is a sign of old money. Both theories miss the root cause. Your hair set point is a reflection of your identity; sure, lots of people have their high school or college hair, but that&amp;#039;s because it&amp;#039;s a prime time for identity formation.  As with weight, people with bad hair set points often know they need to change. They never feel pulled together, they hate seeing pictures of themselves, their head looks too small (or big). But clinging can be a self-destructive behavior. My bad hair is the territory on which I can map my ambivalence about modern existence. I strut about the city in shoes that cost as much as a Chinese miner gets paid in a year, but I hate the world that pays the miner so little, and the world that needs what the miner tears from the earth; and thus, I hate myself. My hair, untouched by steel scissors, unheated by blow-dryer, washed in the mildest soap held in a recycled plastic bottle, says: Nature, I am not so very, very far from you.  But what for me is strangely life-affirming is a dead end for my best friend, Alison. She has a chunky, neo-&amp;#039;30s bob set point. The only time she let her hair grow out it &amp;quot;coincided with serious depression,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s the same as smoking, shoving ashes into your mouth. Fetishizing the dead bits of your body is just creepy to me.&amp;quot; Although she claims she likes my hair, it&amp;#039;s revealing when she tells me that long hair indicates narcissism. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s the same way you instantly know guys with long hair are narcissistic monsters. If you like your dead bits, you are extra self-loving.&amp;quot;  But if you are shaping your hair at all, short or long, aren&amp;#039;t you still fetishizing your dead bits? It&amp;#039;s unavoidable. Hair, that haunting peruke from the grave, is such a tangible reminder of the death in life, and our hair set point speaks volumes (or not) about how we deal with growth and inevitable decay. I suspect Alison resolves her relationship with death by taking action; this plays out via her hair by controlling it, whereas I, by avoiding mine, attempt to passively deny that ultimate scythe-wielding hairdresser&amp;#039;s existence. Kingsley argues that it&amp;#039;s actually all about sex: &amp;quot;Hair is a secondary sex characteristic, and the only one you can flaunt publicly.&amp;quot; My friend Katrina can&amp;#039;t stand the response she gets when her hair is longer. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t want to provide that obvious signifier of femininity,&amp;quot; she says.  Hershberger has some practical suggestions for changing your set point. Start with an expensive, top-notch cut that suits your hair and face type (a person with thick hair can never maintain a thin-haired person&amp;#039;s set point), then find a less expensive person for updates. All sage advice, but before you splurge, get square with yourself or your money&amp;#039;s wasted. Are you ready to be a new you? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/beauty/hair/tips/a9477/hair-today-hair-tomorrow-261380/>