Chinese Symbolism in hair

After completing the summer homework, I thought it would be interesting to look further into Chinese hair culture and symbolism, and decided to base my story on this. I started to research into how symbolism is used in hair in traditional Chinese culture, and I found that one of the main things is based on their marital status.

•Single women (yimei) arranged their hair down with a braid/plait at the back.

•Married women (yisao) use a bun tied in the top of the head.

•Widow women, who didn’t want to marry again, shaved their heads. They saw that cutting the hair in that way is a mutilation and a disfiguration of their image.

These are old traditions with origin in Fuzhou, in Southern China.

I thought that it would be interesting to base my character story on this concept. Obviously I wouldn't be able to base one of my designs on widow women, so I will need to research more to come up with another idea instead of this.