A frank depiction of one of the less talked about symptoms of depression and other mental health struggles, detangling videos on TikTok are offering hope and recovery
Leda Fazal doesn’t easily concede defeat. So, when a pregnant woman walked into her salon in Raleigh, North Carolina a year ago and asked to have her head shaved, she refused. “Her hair was completely matted and she was crying. She told us she had been to so many salons, and they all said they couldn’t detangle it, and she was just done.” Fazal and her assistant looked at one another. “We were just like, all right, we can do this.” It took them eight hours. “But when I tell you, she had the most gorgeous hair... It would have been a crying shame to cut it off...”
Fazal is one of several content creators gaining traction on TikTok for videos of demattings. Typically, these consist of a before shot, a timelapse video of the process and the finished result – complete with the app’s trademark voiceovers. The videos rack up millions of views, and hundreds of thousands of likes and comments. TikTok – the app that launched both a cleaning subculture and a billion Get Ready With Mes – loves a transformation. Creating order from chaos, dematting videos are immensely satisfying to watch, feeding into the culture of ASMR beloved by TikTok users. After Fazal started posting them, she says “the phone has just been ringing off the hook. A lot of people fly to us. We’ve had people wanting to fly over from Europe.”
When it comes to the detangling itself, there’s no big secret, just “multiple stylists, a ton of conditioner and the key ingredient is patience.” But the demand for a judgement-free environment has swept her off her feet. “It’s so crazy to me because I’ve been a hairstylist for more than 20 years and I didn’t even know this was a service that was needed.” Comments on the videos are a combination of those wondering how on earth hair could get like this and an equal number of people relating that this had happened to them, or someone they knew. “Matting can occur in a matter of days,” says Fazal, “and let me tell you – it can happen to anyone.”
In 2009, it happened to me. I was in my first year of university, and going through a period of depression and active addiction – not to mention this was prime indie sleaze era, and backcombing was in. What started as a small knot at my crown soon spread and hardened into a clump I couldn’t get my fingers through. I tried to mask it with more backcombing, which made it worse. Shame compounded the problem: when concerned friends offered to help me brush it out, I would refuse. Eventually, the knot grew to Gordian proportions and I took to hiding it under elaborate woolly hats, like an 18th-century gentleman donning a periwig. When I got home at Christmas, it took my mum and I two days to comb – and cut – it all out. It was the loneliest period in my life. Which is why, when I came across Fazal’s videos, I was struck by how important they were at destigmatising some of the less talked about symptoms of depression.
“How could we expect people who have never had a debilitating illness to understand?” asks Joni*, who suffers from lupus and depression, and who recently bobbed her hip-length hair to make it easier to deal with. It’s not that Joni was unwilling to perform basic self-care, she tells me, it’s that she was unable to. “You feel so fucking disgusting. Especially being a younger woman, feeling under pressure to look good all the time. Trust me – the girl with matted hair being carried to the toilet by her boyfriend is devastated about it.” For Alice*, not showering for days on end became a way to deflect attention from the fact she wasn’t eating. At first, it was that she was too exhausted, mentally and physically. But after a while, “the problem wasn’t that I was anorexic, or that my hair was falling out in clumps, it was that I wasn’t showering. Eventually, I would manage it, and then I was praised. It made me feel worthy of love.”
@ledafazal We are a judgement free salon. We did not ask how, we got the job done and that’s all that matters 💕 So proud of this young lady and her new painfree life again. #demattinghair #tonehairsalon #ledafazal #beautyinfluencer #hairtok #tangledhair ♬ Ambient-style emotional piano - MoppySound
With its emphasis on candour, gallows humour and allergy to the manicured wellness beloved by millennials, TikTok has done a great deal to destigmatise mental health disorders and normalise the struggles that can be experienced. But it can also do a great deal of harm. Although attempts have been made to restrict triggering topics, moderation filters are easily overcome by way of algospeak – ‘thynspiration’, for example, or ‘su1cide’. “Because TikTok is so algorithmic, it can really push you down rabbit holes,” says Taylor Lorenz, author of Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence and Power on the Internet. “If you engage with one type of content, you will be fed more of it, which can end up reinforcing harmful behaviours.”
Mentally ill people have always congregated on the internet, Lorenz tells me. “They’re looking for a community when they couldn’t find one offline. Then, with the rise of social media, we saw the normalisation and discussion of eating disorders on Tumblr and some of the earliest blogs were ED and OCD communities.” Normalisation is a double-edged sword, she says. “On the one hand, it gives a way for people who feel like outsiders to articulate their feelings, and form lifelong bonds with people. On the other, people now use the language of mental illness to discuss everyday struggles, which is counterproductive.” TikTok has manufactured a self-diagnosis epidemic: its truncated format leads to oversimplification. More and more people are pathologising common traits, such as orderliness or absent-mindedness, diagnosing themselves with conditions such as OCD and ADHD. When we widen the parameters of mental illness, and cosplay everyday behaviours in its guise, we run the risk of further marginalising the seriously unwell. If 00s Tumblr romanticised mental illness, TikTok has democratised it.
@ultimatebykomi Hairstylist helps a struggling teen with matted hair (Part 1) #hairtok #mattedhair #detanglehair #depressionhair #part1 ♬ original sound - ULTIMATE
Last year saw the emergence of a new “wellness” trend: bed rotting AKA going to bed for a day or more as an act of self-care. “For many of us it is not a ‘trend’– it’s a survival strategy for a crippling mental illness,” says Sammy*. “We do not have the privilege of choice. If you search ‘bed rotting’, you see lots of people in full make-up with flattering lighting and different camera angles talking about it. This is… not my reality. It has been sanitised to look aesthetically pleasing and palatable. It’s not someone who hasn’t moved or showered in weeks – who is sweaty and smelly and spotty with hair that a crow could nest in; someone who can hardly hold their phone, let alone film a TikTok.”
This is all to say that, among the algorithmic rat traps of perfectly manicured bed-rotters and thynspo, dematting videos offer a frank illustration of mental illness no one could possibly aspire to – but one that is recovery-focused by its very nature. We all know that beauty’s on the inside, but it’s on the outside too. It is incredibly difficult to muster self-worth, a) when you’re depressed, and b) when the evidence of your depression is sitting on top of your head, marking you out as different and giving you a permanent headache.
When we are watching a dematting, we are watching a recovery in miniature. “I just know that feels amazing”, users write. “The relief!!!”, “She must feel wonderful”. We might not know what depression is like, but most of us have had knots in our hair. The feeling is contagious. Who knows what happens after the clients walk out of the salon and our phone screens – detangling is not a cure for mental illness – but for many it’s the first, terrifying step back into the world. It certainly was mine.
*Names have been changed.
@love518salon 3 years of matted hair due to a heart defect, which lead to open heart surgery. You never know what battles people are fighting. #fyp #mattedhair #detangling #viral ♬ Spongebob Tomfoolery - Dante9k Remix - David Snell