Lena Dunham will "never forget" when she cut her hair for the first time.
Lena Dunham
The 30-year-old actress has admitted she was filled with "adrenaline" the first time she picked up a pair of scissors to chop her locks aged 12, and found the beauty process "thrilling" because it gave her a new lease of life, which made her feel "more alive".
Speaking about the beauty blunder in her column for Vogue.com, the 'Girls' star said: "I will never forget the first time I cut my own bangs: the power, the adrenaline. I was twelve years old, standing in the fluorescent light of my parents' bathroom with a pair of orange-handled craft scissors, unaware that I was standing on the precipice of self-definition. The sound of the first chop, thick and harsh, was thrilling. I watched my hair pile up in the sink, then looked into the mirror: I had given myself blunt, successive layers that resembled a staircase headed to nowhere. Nothing about the haircut could have been perceived as skilled, fetching, or even sane. But I had never felt more alive."
Lena has admitted the cut wasn't executed as well as she hoped, and the reaction from her friends at school forced her to cover up her hacking skills for 12 months.
She explained: "The reaction at school the next day wasn't particularly positive, and I wore a bandanna for the rest of the year. But when I'd come home, I liked to remove it and look at myself, Brooklyn's own Joan of Arc, freed from the tyranny of the Rachel, of chunky blonde highlights, of the invisible contract my friends and I seemed to have signed promising that our hair would reflect some sense of wanting to be wanted."
And Lena's parents weren't impressed by her foray into beauty and hair dressing.
She explained: "Each episode was met with sighs from my parents and confusion from my peers, but I remained committed to the notion that my hair was just for me, another avenue for radical self-reinterpretation."
Although the star has trialled a variety of hair styles, she has admitted she "loses" a part of herself when tongs are taken to tame her locks.
She said: "Every time my hair is blown flat or (God forbid) curled with a small but mighty iron, I lose a piece of myself."
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