Change Your Hair, Change Your Life

When women break up with significant others, they tend to break up with their hair, too. There's something about the sound of snipping scissors, the smell of permanent color and the sight of a salon floor covered with the locks he used to run his fingers through that makes it all better.

After Lindsay Metter's live-in boyfriend moved to Florida and they ended their two-year relationship six months ago, she went through a period of depression. The 32-year-old social media expert thought her world had ended. The slump lasted several weeks while she "processed it all."

Once she had sufficient time to reflect, Metter decided she was better off without him. Suddenly, everything had to change.

"I felt like I couldn't look like the same person," she says. "It was weird."

With one salon appointment, she went from having long dark layers to sporting a sleek, light brown bob. She felt like a girl during the relationship and now wanted to look like a woman.

Once her hair changed, her business, Blue Luna Marketing, followed suit. New opportunities came knocking and her clientele grew.

"After he left, better things happened," she says. "I was transformed."

That's just one reason hot-off-a-breakup women march into salons, plop into chairs and demand a change, any change. It represents a new attitude. That's great if, like Metter, she's already adopted the new attitude. Not so great if she's hoping to find it through her hair.

"My responsibility as a stylist is to make sure my clients are (changing their hair) for themselves and not just making a hasty decision," says Staci Linklater, salon director of Globe Salon.

Linklater learned that lesson the hard way. As a novice stylist, she had a long-haired client request a short cut. She complied with the request. About an hour later, her client couldn't stop sobbing at the sight of her short look in the mirror.

Linklater's client wasn't dealing with a breakup. She was dealing with something even more emotional: a pregnancy. With her 20 years of hairstyling experience, she knows to amp up the consultation in four different situations: breakups, pregnancies, recent deaths and recent births. This is when the emotions, and sometimes the hormones, run wild.

New moms especially pose a dilemma. They think a short cut will make their busy schedules and sleepless nights easier to handle. Wrong, says Linklater. No more ponytails usually means no more wash and go.

"I always tell clients with high emotions to think about it. If they still want the change the next time, we'll do it," she says. "Sometimes we know what the clients want better than they do."

All the warnings and delays in the world wouldn't have stopped Barb Garcia-Grove from chopping her hair off after her divorce 20 years ago.

"I cut my long hair into a pixie," says Barb Garcia-Grove, owner of Square Salon and Spa. "That's when you're really serious."

Similar to the famous "Waiting to Exhale" scene in which Angela Basset's character does the same thing, Garcia-Grove wanted to purge her life. The memories, the relationship, the old her -- she wanted them gone. A slower transition, from bra strap to shoulders to chin, wouldn't have had the effect she was going for.

Every woman is different, every breakup is different and every justification for change is different. Some do it for the same reason famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo whacked her signature braids: because their exes loved their long hair. Others, like Reese Witherspoon after her divorce in '06, switch it up because they got comfortable in the relationship and need an update for the single market. But Lara McAdam did it to make sure she never again sold herself short.

After a divorce and two more unhealthy relationships, Garcia-Grove's client took a timeout. McAdam spent more than a year examining her life and concluded she needed to fix some things, both internally and externally. Without a new way of thinking, the 42-year-old felt susceptible to mistakes of her past.

It's been several months since she adopted her new outlook. Last week she sealed the deal with a makeover at Square Salon for that "boost to push forward." Garcia-Grove gave her a sassy bob and makeup artist Kim Katunis delivered a look that had McAdam attached to a hand mirror the rest of the day. She walked out of there with her shoulders back and her head held high, looking and feeling like the kind of woman who doesn't settle for anything but the best.

"It's been amazing," says McAdam. "You don't realize how unpolished you are until you get put back together again."

Follow Xazmin Garza on Twitter at @startswithanx.