Women’s hair shows how they see selves

What do you know about Rapunzel? That she had long, golden hair?

And Marie Antoinette? The perfumed pompadour?

Cleopatra? Dramatic jetblack ’do?

You get the idea — we are what we do to our hair.

So when pop princess Britney Spears shaved her head Sunday, the world took notice. She has been a top online search all week on Yahoo. She was one of the top 10 news stories on CNN, beating out “Continent Phasing Out Lightbulbs by 2009.”

Was her act a cry for help? A statement? A publicity ploy? And why do we care? “Because we’re talking about hair,” says Maria Kotelnicki, a stylist at Styles Salon in Colorado Springs.

Kotelnicki knows all about the importance of a woman’s hair. She wears hers in a dramatic red with black streaks. The style, she says, shows “who I am. In my job, I’m supposed to be a trend-setter.”

Kotelnicki believes women dramatically change their hair for a reason — a divorce, marriage, death. “That’s when they often ask for a total makeover.”

In her book, “Rapunzel’s Daughters: What Women’s Hair Tells Us About Women’s Lives,” sociologist Rose Weitz writes “Our hair is one of the primary ways we tell others who we are and by which others evaluate us.”

A trio of friends who met Tuesday to run together at Memorial Park had their hair pulled back into ponytails.

“We’re exercising now, but when we aren’t, we all have different ideas about our hair,” says Monique Salaz, 19. Salaz has waist-length black hair. “It shows strength.”

Danielle Contreras, 22, calls hair “the most personal thing. It says everything about me.” Her below-the-shoulders cut says, “I’m fun, outgoing, brave.”

Shara Richards, 18, believes her hair, black and chinlength, “is the most important thing about the way I look.”

And for Britney, her hair was a part of an image that kept her in the spotlight. “She’s a representation of sexuality for many people,” says Rhonda Williams, an assistant professor in counseling and human services at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

So maybe after a blitz of media criticism, the pop star’s haircutting act wasn’t so surprising. “How Britney has been treated is a reflection of what we do to girls in our society,” Williams says. “It’s like she is saying ‘What have you left me with, other than my hair?’”