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A woman whose ultra thick hair gives her headaches has revealed she regularly cuts off half her mane.
Lola María, 28, from Montreal, Canada, has gone viral on TikTok with 46 million views, after showing how she cuts out clumps of her incredibly thick tresses herself using thinning scissors.
And the extra long hair means she suffers with painful headaches when wearing it in a ponytail, which is why she’s embraced an undercut hairstyle to reduce the weight – a very short cut on the back and sides with long hair over the top.
Lola Maria with her undercut fully on show. She said: ‘My life is significantly better with an undercut, my head feels lighter. I love my undercut, I love being able to rock two different hair styles at the same time.’
Video grab of Lola María cutting clumps out of her incredibly thick hair. She often spends $100 a month on her hair, which is hard to maintain.
Lola said: ‘I have a lot of hair and it can look like a dream to some people, but for me it’s problematic. I take my thinning shears and go crazy, I’m never afraid of removing too much.’
She said that she’s happy to be an advocate for the style, despite trolls accusing her of lying or saying her look is ‘disgusting’.
The software engineer added: ‘I’ve had a few messages from girls telling me they’ve got a lot of hair too and after seeing my video they’ll get an undercut.
So I just keep sharing how I do my own undercut, how I thin my hair, how I style and even how I dye it.
Lola Maria showing how thick her hair was before she started having an undercut style. She says the style now stops her headaches and over heating in the summer.
Lola Maria with a newly cut undercut style. She gets many comments about her chosen hair style but she says it’s practical and makes life so much easier for herself
‘I’ve never come across anyone with as much hair as me, and now they’ve found me on TikTok.’
As a child Lola remembered she would cry when she had to detangle her hair before school.
‘I’d complain to my mother,’ she said. ‘She’d suggest shortening my hair would be less painful, but I didn’t want to cut my princess-long hair as a seven-year-old.’
While she was always told she had unusually thick hair, it only really dawned on her when she tried to dye her hair herself at the age of 15.
‘I used drug store hair dye and I needed three boxes and a half to cover all of my hair’ she recalled.
She said she still struggles to find a hairstylist who knows how to handle her thick locks, so she started to cut it herself when she was a teenager and never stopped. In the past two years she’s only seen a professional three times to get a more radical haircut.
Lola Maria showing the many styles she wears with an undercut. Many people don’t even notice when she has her hair down.
Lola said: ‘They cut it as they’d usually do with regular hair and in the end up I’m left with a lot of volume and looking like Dora the Explorer.
‘Every time I go to a new salon they add a note to my file saying that cutting my hair takes longer, so next time they book two hours instead of an one hour slot for my cuts.’
Lola first experimented with an undercut hairstyle when she was 17.
She said: ‘I was hanging out with a friend at her place, we were talking about how insane the amount of hair on my head was.
‘She asked if she could give me an undercut using her brother’s hair clippers. I really liked it, but a boy from school asked me for permission to feel my undercut and told me it felt like a boy’s head. At 17, I felt ashamed and I let it grow back.’
Lola didn’t get the haircut again until she was 26.
She said: ‘My life is significantly better with an undercut, my head feels lighter. I love my undercut, I love being able to rock two different hair styles at the same time. I get a lot of comments on TikTok saying I’m crazy for shaving my head and that I’ll regret it when I want my hair to grow back. Well, been there, done that!’
She shaves the undercut every two or three weeks which takes about 40 minutes, and thins it out only twice each year.
Lola said: ‘Thinning my hair removes a lot of weight, but also adds a lot of volume, so I do it only when I can’t stand a ponytail anymore without getting a headache.’
She gets headaches every time she tries to pull her hair back into a ponytail or any other updo, because her hair is so heavy.
Lola said: ‘Headaches start with my scalp hurting, the scalp pain then transitions into a headache. It’s annoying because my hair is also hot, it keeps me warm during winter but during the summer can be challenging. It’s either the ponytail plus headache, or not styling my hair and having sweat on my neck all day long.’
Lola Maria showing off her different undercut styles. She believes her TikTok videos help others ‘For every negative comment, I get three positive ones. I particularly love seeing comments saying ‘this is so relatable to me.’
Lola also says that maintaining that much hair also costs her up to $100 a month in products. Even when it’s just shoulder length, she needs to buy two boxes of hair dye to colour her hair, and requires a higher volume of shampoo and conditioner to keep it clean.
She said: ‘I need extra-large elastic bands, and my elastic bands often break. When you have as much hair as I do you can’t afford for your hair to be unhealthy: dry hair has more volume, oily hair feels heavier, damaged hair breaks easily and becomes frizzy. I have to keep changing my hair routine, the products I use and even my diet; I think I have healthy hair now.’
When people see Lola’s thick dark tresses they tell her she is lucky, or wonder how she can function with that much weight on her hair.
She said: ‘The thing my partners do notice is the unusual amount of hair I shed every day. There are hairs everywhere in my house!’
Lola María before her undercut with her long locks on full show. She said in the summer she’d find her hair totally unmanageable before she decided to have an undercut style
Lola made a video for TikTok, in December, of her doing a hair thinning session and it went viral, racking up 46 million views.
While many commenters were astounded by her unusual tresses, trolls accused her of lying about her hair or that her undercut is ‘disgusting’.
‘Many people said ‘You shave your head because your dad abandoned you’ – I seriously get that one a lot, it doesn’t make sense to me at all,’ she said. ‘If you don’t have thick, heavy hair, it might be hard to understand that hair can actually cause headaches.
‘For every negative comment, I get three positive ones. I particularly love seeing comments saying ‘this is so relatable to me’ or ‘I have the same problem’. Some people like my content and some people hate it, it makes me feel controversial!’
She wants to be transparent about her hair and the problems it brings, but also be an advocate for the undercut hairstyle on women.
She said: ‘I gave up on my undercut because someone told me it felt like a boy’s head – I had a solution to my problem and I didn’t go for it because I felt insecure, I wanted to be pretty.
‘But my undercut never made me less pretty, and it took me a long time to figure that out.’
