bon mot whenever he felt she had had a little too much chopped off at the hairdresser. In reality he loved the hairstyles of his wife and three daughters, a mixture of short and long between us, and would have been horrified had any of us retrieved the tape measure to ensure our hair was proportionally correct. And yet rules persist, stubbornly so, and the attention received by in Berlin recently only served to remind us that that old premise—that women of a certain age should not wear their hair long—has no place in our modern vernacular, let alone at today’s salon.