Be Honest: How Often Do You Get Food Stuck In Your Hair?

You're enjoying a delicious dinner of well-sauced linguine. How tasty! But then, oh no: You lean over your plate to reach for the bread basket and you hear the unmistakable schwip of your silky long hair sliding across your entree. You slowly sit back and realize that a few of your gorgeous strands are coated in marinara. You spend the rest of the evening trying to hide your tomato-flavored hair from the general public.

Long hair is a hazard, especially for people who eat with zeal. If you have hair longer than, say, your collarbone, you run the risk of getting food debris stuck in your mane every time you sit down for a meal. With this in mind, The Takeout's long-haired staffers must remain ever vigilant. Read our saucy-haired confessions below, and feel free to sound off in the comments if you frequently find yourself with morsels in your mop.

I've been growing my hair out for years, and I've achieved a bitchin' upper-back-length shag. Unfortunately, a traditional shag is a layered haircut, which means that you can tie back your longest strands and still be left with a dangly minefield. For that reason, I usually keep my hair tightly ponytailed during the day. But last night, I grew careless. I let my hair down and luxuriated on the couch with a big bowl of fettuccine—only to find a clump of alfredo sauce in my hair a few minutes later. What did I do, you ask? Why, I did what any well-bred product of the Ozarks would do: I licked it off and went to bed. —Lillian Stone, staff writer

I am relatively new to the long hair game. That sounds like a dumb statement, considering it takes a while for hair to grow, but for most of my years my hair was always clipped on the sides and short on top. Then, I put off getting a haircut. And I put it off for years due to not only laziness, but extreme laziness. When the pandemic started, there was zero reason for me to get a haircut then either. So, that's how you should go about growing your hair out: start by being lazy, then let a pandemic do the heavy lifting.

Since my hair is indeed pretty damn long now, I always keep it pulled back either in some sloppy bun or in a ponytail, but the issue is that, as Lillian points out, some hair isn't long enough to fit into the hair tie. (Some of you understand, yes?) It wisps down around the side of my face, which I find terribly annoying, but what's worse is when it gets in my mouth while I'm eating.

I'll be frank with you, I realize it's my own hair, but it never stops being fuckin' gross. For multiple reasons: one, when that happens I'm essentially cannibalizing myself, and two, now there's food in my hair, hair in my food, and hair in my mouth. But aside from taking a shower during the middle of dinner, there's not a whole lot I can do, so I lamely wipe it off with a wet paper towel until it happens again. Because it does. —Dennis Lee, staff writer