For many people, cutting a chunk of their own hair out is a typical childhood experience; a milestone, if you will. If you haven’t done it yourself, there are plenty of videos online showing the aftermath of kids hitting such ‘milestones.’ (I myself still remember the shock in my mother’s eyes after she saw what I had done.)

But quite a few individuals say goodbye to their hair later in life, as they try to give themselves haircuts as adults, often not that successfully, unfortunately.

Many of people’s less fortunate hair-related decisions were likely made during quarantine. Back then, they didn’t have much of a choice, as, due to the lockdown, they couldn’t go get their hair done as they normally would have. So, they tried everything from trimming their ends to dying their hair to even getting buzz cuts during the time they spent at home.

But to be fair, that was arguably the best time to try all of that out, since if the haircut didn’t end up looking good, no one outside of the household would likely see it. Not right away, at least.

A YouGov poll from 2020 found that during the outbreak of COVID-19, close to three in ten Americans had their hair cut at home, either by themselves or a member of their household. The poll also found that men were more likely to get their hair cut than their female counterparts during that time. More than half of surveyed women said they hadn’t had their hair cut at home at that point and they weren’t planning on doing so.

Nowadays, according to another YouGov poll, roughly 18% of people in the US always have their hair cut at home; 13% of them do it sometimes, and 12% rarely do it. Close to four-in-ten of respondents said they’ve never cut their hair under their own roof.

Around the time of the pandemic, in addition to cutting their own hair, many people tried coloring their hair, too, whether to fix their roots or to try out a new color completely. According to Statista, between the years of 2017 and 2021, the number of women dying their hair at home increased in countries all over the world. In Spain, for instance, it went from 29% to 31% over the course of four years, in Germany it grew from 20% to 23%, and in the US—from 22% to 23%.

It’s safe to assume that once people learned how to dye their hair at home, some decided to continue doing so even after the pandemic ended.

In the years following 2020, some people didn’t limit themselves to just trimming their ends or touching up on their roots but instead changed their hair completely. While to some it might have seemed like nothing more than a style change, for others, it was a way to regain control during the turbulent time.

According to Dr. Vivian Diller, a psychologist, and author of Face It: What Women Really Feel as Their Looks Change, when everything else in the world feels out of control, one way for people to retain some control is by controlling what they can. “Organizing our closets or cutting our hair can serve that purpose,” Dr. Diller said in an interview with Refinery29.

The expert continued by pointing out that it’s not uncommon for women to change their looks to mark certain significant changes in their lives, such as marriages, moves, or losses. “It’s possible that cutting hair or changing styles during COVID is a way for women to use their appearance to make a statement marking this world event,” she added.

It’s unclear whether the haircuts and hairstyles on this list were a result of the pandemic, but they sure were lessons. Lessons that it might be better not to cut your own hair or try to save up to dye it at a sketchy salon. Though, some of them were arguably not even lessons, but plain old bad luck. But whatever the case, there’s always that glimmer of hope one can hold on to—hair grows back.