new thread
I've been considering growing my hair out for about a year. I'm 16 years old, and as you've all probably noticed not many guys in their teens have long hair anymore. Out of my whole high school of 1100 people, there are three long haired guys (two other chopped theirs last week). My track coach, who is 31, had awesome hair that looked really really good and masculine NOT fem, but he cut it a few days ago too. I'd really like long hair, but parents and grandparents all think I'm a rebel for having just regular length hair that's not ultra short now. So I need to try and conceal this hair growth as much as I can. If anyone knows of a site with progression pics, could you post it up on this site? I'd like to know how I'm gonna manage to do this.
Taso
I don't have progression photos as such, but I do have photos from various ocassions over last 1.5 years that I've been growing my hair. I started with quite a short cut (about .5-inch high) with a spiky look. To maintain this spikedness, the barber told me to use gel. So I began using gel, every day. I was 16, btw, when I began.
What this eventually led to is that as my hair grew, my spikes got to the point where they couldn't stand up anymore and they were falling to the back of my head. After a month or two, I was just gelling my hair all the way back, nice and slick. The comments at the time were: "What happened to your spiky hair? You look all slick now." Usually one application of gel in the morning was enough to last through the entire school day and only towards the evening, around 6pm, the hair would begin to fall out of place.
By the end of one year, my senior high school year was over and my hair was barely reaching my shoulders in the back. The biggest problem here was that although the top of the head was all contained by the gel, the bottom part (at the neck) was sort of spread out and sticking out. I did nothing about that, since it didn't present that much of a problem, but now that I think of it, probably a hair spray would let me keep it straight in the back without giving it that gelled look.
You say that you have regular length hair. Try slicking it back with gel, see if you like it and to see the reaction of people around you. If you get a decent reaction (one you can live with), then go ahead and let it grow.
Whatever you do to grow your hair, you'll have to deal with comments from your parents or friends/peers. It is inevitable whenever something "out-of-line" happens; for example, my parents were cracking jokes for weeks after my brother shaved his head bald (he had "typical" short hair back then). If the moral pressure becomes intolerable, and you have more or less decent communication with your parents, try to talk it out with them. If they don't accept it, try to enter in a contract of sorts with them. If you have good grades or good athletic performance or anything that your parents may be proud of, tell them that you would like to grow long hair. Then tell them that you will keep up the grades or whatever in exchange for your parents, ahem, shutting the heck up about your hair.
I also found that sometimes telling my parents that "my hair is weird-looking like that only now, wait a few months more and it will look good" helped prevent comments about my hair for a while.
Finally, consider wearing a ponytail after a year and a half or so. You'd have to use some sort of spray or gel to keep it all neat and under control at that point because your hair won't be long enough to fully contain itself in a pony tail. I found that wearing a pony tail virtually eliminates comments about my hair from my father and greatly reduces them for the rest of the family.
Good luck!