Mine’s the Date Bait. Pic via Bad Postcards Tumblr

There are deep and meaningful personal epiphanies, and then there are epiphanies that only happen when you get a new haircut.

I never used to go to the hairdresser. In UCC, I would go to a now-closed hairdressing college off Patrick’s Street and avail of the twenty euro special, with resulted in fringed bobs of a different variety every six weeks ranging in quality and execution from Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction to Darina Allen in the early Nineties.

After college, I cut my own hair. The nail scissors was upgraded to fringe level and everyone was happy with my look, especially me. With the perfect, lens-free vision of hindsight, I can now see that I looked quite scruffy (this is putting it kindly). At least I wore that look with conviction – and a pair of thick-rimmed glasses that either distracted or grew attention to that week’s accidental asymmetric fringe monstrosity.

I hated going to the hairdressers. I hated getting layers – to me it looked like someone cutting a shelf into your head. I now realise that I was thinking that because I was just going to crap hairstylists who didn’t particularly care about whether my ‘do looked good or not. It took getting a well-considered haircut with actual layers to realise that all those bad hairdressers really were cutting elaborate shelving units into my gruaig.

There’s good and bad in every profession. Bad hairstylists won’t care about you if you don’t care about yourself, and at that time I could have been bald and only given a toss if it was cold outside and couldn’t find a woolly hat.

This all changed about a year ago when a very wise person had the brainwave of putting me in front of a camera, asking me to present a fashion video. On a whim (and because I knew my mother would be watching), I made an appointment at Sobe Brown, which I was assured was the very best in the city, and got a haircut that most assuredly did not cost twenty euro.

And I haven’t gone anywhere else since.

A good hairstylist will know exactly what you want no matter how badly you articulate and Aisling (I don’t mind divulging) knew what I wanted when I came in with about twenty pictures of Brigitte Bardot, saying ”I want something like this… but also not like this at all”.

There is a transformative power in a good haircut. Yesterday, while I was getting a trim that somehow changed my face, my best friend was getting the Big One. The pixie crop. I am happy to report that she looks like the perfect synthesis of Lena Dunham and Frankie from The Saturdays. She looks like a totally different person, but still just as beautiful as she was before all her hair was lopped off.

The best haircuts are the ones that make you look like you’ve had great hair forever – not like you’ve just had a haircut. The best haircuts make a person look like the best version of him or herself.

It’s something to consider investing in – because if you don’t invest in yourself, who will?