You are a fun-loving, out-going person, but people only recognize these qualities in your personality when they have a chat with you because your stringy, long, limp and badly colored hair suggests that you are anything but. Or maybe you are a highly intelligent person with revolutionary ideas and natural entrepreneurial skills, but your shaggy, unkempt mane says otherwise, even if you are dressed in the finest Armani suit.Now you might be thinking, ‘good heavens, it is only hair!’ but hair says a lot more about you than you think. Research has demonstrated that we begin to form an impression of an individual’s personality and character within seconds of meeting them. Now while there are many other factors that contribute to how people see you, for instance, makeup and clothing hairstyle has been shown to be one of the most prominent factors on the impressions people make of us.
So what exactly does your hairstyle or general hair design say about you? Well for one thing it’s the starting point of conveying the image you want for yourself. And while many people, women and men alike, usually try to go for styles that they think will ‘look good on them’ or hair designs that will convey a particular image they want, sometimes the hair styles and designs you choose can miss the mark completely and can end up conveying the image you didn’t want. The worse part is that many people don’t even realize it!
Well thank goodness for researchers at Yale University who did a little study on ‘Personality perceptions correlating with hairstyles and designs.’ Here’s what they found out, and what you should know your hairstyle says about you.According to the study experimenters discovered that women with sexy hairstyles were perceived as less intelligent, while women with short hair were viewed as more confident and outgoing. These stereotypes were influenced by other factors including hair length and hair color. Women with long blonde hair such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Winslet were viewed as more affluent and sexier while women with medium-length darker hair such as Sandra Bullock and Jennifer Garner were perceived as smarter and more fun loving.
Again, women are not the only ones burdened with these appearance-related stereotypes. Men with short hair that is longer in the front were described as sexier and more confident, but were also seen as more self-absorbed. Those with medium-length hair parted on the side were described as being more intelligent and competent, yet were considered more narrow-minded. Men with extremely long hair were viewed as less intelligent but more good-natured.
So what’s the point of all of this? Well these descriptions of personality and character reveal how influential a hairstyle can be on creating an impression, but the main point about having a hair design that suits your personality is exactly that! It is your personality, not some famous Hollywood actor/actress and certainly not a character from a movie, so go for a design that reflects you and that you are comfortable enough with because you will be out in the real world where you see people and when people see you, unlike the one way viewing of television where the actors can’t look at you.So get going and start figuring out the intricate parts of your personality that you can add to your hairstyle and the general image of yourself you want people to see when they look at your hair.
