Robyn von Meding had long strawberry hair down to her waist until last week.
She is from Greystones and at the age of 10, she decided to get her long luscious locks chopped.
Her hair will be given to the Rapunzel Foundation to make wigs for children and adults living with alopecia and cancer.
Robyn also wants to raise funds for Child Vision, a non-profit organisation that supports visually impaired children like her.
In the photographs you can see the hair in two plaits and the scissors poised; you can see the smiling girl with her new modern style holding aloft her two plaits.
How generous and how lovely. But will she mourn her hair?
The photographs reminded me of Audrey Hepburn in The Nun's Story – where the older nun gets out the big scissors and chops off the young novice’s hair.
It was more traumatic than the shower scene in Psycho.
It reminded me too of Jo from Little Woman who sells her hair to raise money for the family but still has a little moment when she sobs to herself about losing her “one beauty”.
We were three sisters with an abundance of long hair.
It was very thick and very curly. You could send a troop of boy scouts to camp in my hair and lose them for a week.
When I was about five, my mother went into hospital to have my brother – you got two weeks silver service when you had a baby back then – no wonder the families were big.
My father let us wear what we liked – just thick brown tights and an Aran jumper thanks dad, never mind the skirt – and, because we hated having to have our hair combed, he just scooped it up in a top notch and left it.
When my mother returned with the new baby who brought us each a tube of Smarties – he was a very kind baby – she blanched when she undid my top notch.
The curls had bunched into a sticky knot and there were tears and scissors and a lot of tugging and that was my first haircut.
But then the hair grew and grew.
I was 14 when we three sisters had our first visit to the hairdresser to get our long hair cut short.
He looked at us, then twisted all that hair up into three long tails and went along with the scissors, holding each tail up, snip, snip, snip; all gone.
He felt like the chopping nun from The Nun's Story.
He got a kick out of it. I hope our hair went to a good cause but I think it went to the bin.
We were officially shorn and all given the same haircut.
“You have the exact same haircut as the head girl,” the dinner lady observed the next day.
Cue some eye rolling on my part.
“That’s because she’s my sister,” I did not say. (Street cred, you know).
Did I miss my hair? Not really.
It “just growed” like Topsy said and I never needed a hat in winter because I had enough to keep me warm.
It was so curly that a friend from work called me Brian May of Queen guitarist fame.
It was so curly that an African journalist used to ask me if he could touch it.
I, in turn, was enthralled with the young woman in halls whose blonde ringleted hair was so long that she could sit on it.
But hair can be a faff.
And then I had our boy, but unlike my mother, I didn’t get two weeks’ silver service in the cottage hospital.
What I did get was hair that suddenly lost all curl. It fell flat.
And as motherhood robbed my time, back to the hairdresser I went and got the lot chopped off – phew, all gone.
“What have you done to your hair?” people asked as if I’d lost my identity.
“I’m still here, it’s still me,” I wanted to tell them… just a shorn version.
And now, time has whizzed on and looking half decent requires a direct debit to the hairdresser.
I shall not be spending my pension on brandy and old lace.
Teeth; hair; eyes; feet – maintenance costs a fortune.
Going through my mother’s things after she died, I found an old envelope.
Inside was a lock of my golden baby hair. And oh… my one beauty and oh… where has the time gone?
