Can Short Haircuts Make You Look Older? We Asked A Celebrity Hairstylist

While you certainly don’t have to cut your hair short as you age, having less hair to style and color is undeniably convenient. One common misconception about short hair on aging beauties is that it makes you look older. Drawing attention to your beautiful features with a shorter cut is actually a tried and true trick to make you look younger! 

We reached out to celebrity hairstylist Allison Depriestre (whose clients include Salma Hayek, Olivia Culpo and Maria Menounous, among others) for more debunked myths about short hair and helpful styling tips. 

You might think this look is a double whammy— a short, matronly cut and a gray color— but Depriestre explains that it’s not the color, necessarily, that ages you.

For an iconic example, Depriestre encourages women over 50 to look to Miranda Hobbes, the fictional character portrayed by Cynthia Nixon on And Just Like That, the recent reboot of Sex and The City on HBO.  

“In one episode of the show, the character Miranda gets a comment about how her gray/white hair makes her look old,” Depriestre says. “The color is not the problem and it suits her very well, but the way she styles it makes her look old. She has her short bob styled in a smooth blowout with its ends curved inside. It’s boring and it’s rigid.” 

Depriestre adds that as the character and her look evolve throughout the series, the stylists “style the same haircut in messy waves,” and it changes everything. Depriestre explains that adding necessary texture to the character’s hair, rather than the color, is what makes her look “so more fun, and therefore younger.” 

Ultimately, short hair can make you look older, but it doesn’t have to. “The way you style your short hair has a bigger impact on how old it makes you look rather than the actual haircut itself,” she says. This leads us to the importance of texture in a short haircut, and its instant de-aging effects.