"Your Hair Makes Me Look Like a Bad Mom": A Brief Review of the Semiotics of Hair

Breaking the Code

Hair is defined as the "threadlike strands growing from the skin of humans and other mammals", but that does not begin to describe the social significance of your hair. Color, cut, and style are all part of a shared but often tacit set of rules and expectations, and the social evaluation of your hair (or your children's hair) is perceived as speaking volumes about your beliefs and place in a given culture or community. You can't avoid it: how you wear your hair says something about you, and losing your hair to a disease like alopecia robs you of that ability to "speak through your hair".

In this episode we discuss key findings from a semiotic study of hair, the kind of analysis we do on a regular basis to study the visual signs in a given therapeutic or social sphere. e love doing these analyses because they uncover human truths in aspects of life that hide in plain sight, right before our eyes - or for this episode - right on top of our heads.

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