Locks of Love: The kindest cut
Published: May 13, 2005
Taylor Bullard looks like your typical 9-year-old girl.
She wears jean shorts and glittery tank tops. A bit shy, she has a big, toothy smile.
She also has long, thick brown hair. To keep cool during softball games she pulls it up in a ponytail or in braids.
Bullard would never think of cutting if off. That is until recently when it grew out to her tailbone.
Taylor was growing her hair for reasons other than to sport cute pigtails.
She wanted to help children without hair. When she heard of Locks of Love, an organization that provides hairpieces to children with long-term medical hair loss, Taylor knew she could help.
Most of the donated pieces go to children with alopecia areata, a skin disease with no known cause or cure.
“They don’t have that much hair and I think they would like it if they had some,” Taylor said.
When she went to the Indio Fantastic Sams recently to have her hair cut, she was nervous.
“It was scary,” she said.
Taylor had been growing her hair out for more than a year - ever since she saw her teacher at Amelia Earhart Elementary School cut her hair for the organization.
Each month, her mother, Corey Bullard, would put a tape measurer to Taylor’s hair. It had to be at least 10 inches for Locks of Love to make it into a wig.
“(Taylor) would say, ‘Let’s keep growing it for a month.’ Until finally she said, ‘Let’s go and cut it,’ ” Bullard said. “I am very proud of her. The stylist said to her ‘You know what a good thing you are doing?’ Taylor understands. This is something she wanted to do.”
Although she sometimes misses putting her hair in pony tails, Taylor said she feels lighter and is much cooler during her softball games. Her hair is now just past her shoulders.
“My friends say I’m crazy for giving it away,” Taylor said, but she has inspired some of her classmates to grow and donate their hair as well.
Her 6-year-old sister, Drew, wishes she could grow her hair and donate it, too.
“It doesn’t grow as fast and it’s thinner,” Bullard said of her youngest daughter’s hair. “She is proud of her sister, too.”
While the Locks of Love Web site states that mainly children donate hair, Deanna Stewart, manager at the Indio Fantastic Sams, says adults come in as well. The salon offers free haircuts to those donating to Locks of Love. They mail the hair from the salon to the organization.
“We had a gentleman come in about a month ago. He had seriously long hair and a lot of it. We cut that off,” Stewart said.
The salon averages a haircut a day for Locks of Love.
“The little girls get a big kick out of it,” she said.
Taylor is one of those girls and said she plans to come back to Fantastic Sams in another year, when her hair grows out again.
If you enjoyed this good news Subscribe to Good News Blog
Share this
To share this simply copy and paste one of the below URL's: