On Statue-Cleaning Bacteria and Pandemic Haircuts

I chopped off thirteen inches of hair last night.

I was already overdue for a haircut a year ago when the pandemic came and shut down normal things like being indoors with strangers for grooming reasons. I decided to hold off on cutting my increasingly Lady-Godiva-length locks until I had been vaccinated. Chopping off my hair would be a rite, a tangible way for me to mark the grief I carry from the last year and the giddiness of being able to imagine the after side of all this.

And last night the moment came. I sat in a swivel chair as a soft spoken Quebecker massaged my scalp and then sheared off the hair that had continued to grow and grow despite most everything else screeching to a halt.

I read last week about a team of art restorers in Florence who spent the past autumn cleaning Michelangelo statues with bacteria. Bacteria! The carved marble figures in the Medici Chapel’s New Sacristy had stains that had been resistant to the last decade of restoration work, so this team of scientists let loose different strains of bacteria to eat the layers of grime. Centuries of wax, oil, even remnants of the Medici bodies encased in the tombs. They worked in secret this fall, in the midst of Italy’s second wave.

Can you relate to the feeling of things being so messy that the only solution is to bring out the grime-eating bacteria? There's something about the grittiness and earthiness of the image that appeals to me, as well as the ingenuity of the scientists who dreamed up this technique. I feel like I'm going to need bacteria-on-marble levels of innovation to figure out how to process the pandemic, the stains and mess and dirt.

A first step, a haircut. As I walked home last night in the golden hour, my hair thirteen inches lighter, I felt altered, restored, like I was gleaming as brightly as marble that had been freshly nibbled clean.

I took these photos of Michelangelo’s sculptures in Florence in 2018, before their bacterial spa treatments.