January 22, 2004 - Hair Length at SBCC

When it came time to assign tasks to the dedicated staffers of edhat.com this week, there was no problem getting volunteers for yesterday’s work … at least among the male members of the dedicated staff.  The job was to walk around sunny City College looking at young coeds and classify their hair length.  We had wanted to classify them as “long, straight, curly, fuzzy, snaggy, shaggy, ratty, matty, oily, greasy, fleecy, shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen, knotted, polka-dotted, twisted, beaded, braided, powdered, flowered, and confettied, bangled, tangled, spangled, and spaghettied” (like in the Hair song). But we thought it was more practical to use short, medium, and long … but then again, maybe not.

The pictures above show our friends Halle, Jennifer, and Nicole sporting easily identifiable hair lengths.  But in the real world things are not quite that simple. The dedicated staff made these simple but imperfect rules:

EDHAT.COM UPDATE 1. Lunch With Louie - Louie and Ed dined at the Santa Barbara Brewing Co. yesterday afternoon. See what the pessimistic food critic had to say about lunch. 2. Does Anyone Know? - Ed got an email yesterday from someone in New York looking for Santa Barbara Bavarian Whipping Cream.  We couldn’t help him. If anyone knows anything about this, contact us and we will pass the info along.

Short- above shoulders
Medium – above shoulder blade
Long – on or below shoulder blades

Don’t agree? … Call the hot line!

Around noon, armed with a firm set of rules, sunglasses, and mechanical tally counters, a group of mostly male staffers proceeded to walk around City College staring gleefully at all the women who were making their way to and from class … working at edhat.com is a tough job, but someone has to do it.

In all we looked at over 500 heads of hair, from blond to black, curly to straight, thin to full, tied up in a bun, and blowing in the wind. We did not see any hats. The most common length we saw was long (50%), followed by medium (38%), followed by short (12%).  Most of the shorts were older than the average coed.   In our survey we also observed that 50% of the women had some sort of hair bonding device in their hair like ties, clips, or bands.

Our subscribers were evenly split on long versus medium. We think it is possible that in the general population there would be more medium, but with the younger sample from City College, long was a definite winner. A random pick-a-name-from-the-edhat drawing produced AdultEd (fitting name, eh?) as the winner of the contest. AdultEd will receive a Peet’s coffee card and a free edhat to wear on bad hair days.

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