#pre-Warren flds women generally looked like mennonites or maybe any Christian who cared about modesty. the difference is wild

[spurgie-cousin]

You resharing that FLDS photo essay had me wondering, and google wasn’t really helpful beyond “long hair is their trademark, the leaders require women to have long hair”…is there a significance to that specific swooping/wave in front hairstyle? Like the picture of the 3 girls on the couch. Of all of the things to do with long hair, why style it like that?

Based on what I've heard some ex-FLDS women say in interviews and books, I think there's a few reasons. I know that those styles with the swoops and braiding take most women a decent amount of time to do, and they've said that the leadership encourages complex hairstyles because it's another way of gauging women's obedience. If you're spending hours a day to get your hair just right, in a very particular style, it's proof that you take what the leadership says seriously. There's an ex-FLDS influencer on tiktok who said that she would purposefully do the bare minimum with her hair and leave out flyaway strands as a way to appear rebellious, because the FLDS takes women's looks so seriously (she also said she'd purposefully roll up her sleeves to look rebellious to elders).

As for the particular style, I think it can be attributed to this thing some cults do where they purposefully choose outwardly "ugly"/objectively weird "uniforms", especially for women, as a way of isolating women that much further from the outside world (gloriavale is another good example of this). FLDS women can't help but realize how much they stick out when they're in a secular public place, and feeling that regularly makes a person more likely to shy away from the people who are different, and who might be making fun of their appearance, or who gawk at them, etc. It creates an "us vs. them" kind of mentality where the only people you feel safe around are the ones who look like you.

It's worth pointing out too that the current "uniform" for FLDS women was created almost completely by Warren Jeffs, so I know some things just boil down to how he prefers women to look.