I was six years old and sitting in a hairdresser’s chair looking at my tiny frame in the mirror when I had my first Big Chop, the sort that changes everything.

Until then, my immensely curly hair had defied gravity and grown outwards at an alarming pace, never flowing nicely around my face. It was a bone of contention in my family; my mum loved my curls, they ‘made me who I was’, but I hated them with a visceral passion. This wasn’t hair! It was a mop! A matted mop.

As I got ever-so-slightly older, my hair started to grow and flow with the natural order of things and I started to love my curls and enjoy their length, until The Big Chop, which resulted in my hair landing at my jawline in an isosceles-shaped triangle. The hair that I had grown to love lay scattered around me on the tiled flooring; suddenly, there was nothing anybody could do but tell me that my bob was great, that it suited me. It didn’t matter that I cried at the lost hair or that I shouted at the hairdresser that I hated it; my hair was gone – not to be seen again for a while.

How a haircut can change your life (and your style)