Somewhat relatedly, when I started growing my hair long, I got exclusively positive feedback about it. It would have been easy to take this as evidence that clearly this was a good decision and this is just the better hair style for me. But then again, personal feedback like this tends to be very strongly filtered. Firstly, as in your example, the vast majority of people who disagree will just say nothing rather than telling me “I think this looks worse than before”. Secondly, there were a few cases where people saw me after a longer time, said something like “Oh, your hair is longer!” and then after a brief pause added something like “Looks good!”—I suspect many of these cases were just the person realizing that pointing that out without giving a compliment would seem rude or awkward, so they quickly made sure to say something nice about it.
Oh yeah, that actually reminds me that after not cutting my hair for several years, I recently did cut it. That gave me the chance to notice that when I had long hair, various people told me it looked good—and then after I cut it, different people told me that I looked good for having cut it shorter. But at no point did anyone say “your hair looks bad now”. (Actually no wait, one person did say that my hair was “ruined” now that I cut it, but that person was also ten years old.)
Somewhat relatedly, when I started growing my hair long, I got exclusively positive feedback about it. It would have been easy to take this as evidence that clearly this was a good decision and this is just the better hair style for me. But then again, personal feedback like this tends to be very strongly filtered. Firstly, as in your example, the vast majority of people who disagree will just say nothing rather than telling me “I think this looks worse than before”. Secondly, there were a few cases where people saw me after a longer time, said something like “Oh, your hair is longer!” and then after a brief pause added something like “Looks good!”—I suspect many of these cases were just the person realizing that pointing that out without giving a compliment would seem rude or awkward, so they quickly made sure to say something nice about it.
Oh yeah, that actually reminds me that after not cutting my hair for several years, I recently did cut it. That gave me the chance to notice that when I had long hair, various people told me it looked good—and then after I cut it, different people told me that I looked good for having cut it shorter. But at no point did anyone say “your hair looks bad now”. (Actually no wait, one person did say that my hair was “ruined” now that I cut it, but that person was also ten years old.)
Fwiw., my hair grew longer and people often point that out, but never has anyone followed with “looks good”.
Then let me be the first one to (honestly) say that you do look good in long hair.