It’s just hair. Dead cells. Protein filaments. Yet, when Kriti Sanon sits in a high-end salon chair and watches a stylist lop off six inches of her career-defining mane, the internet treats it like a religious conversion. She calls it "therapy." I call it a Tuesday for someone who doesn’t have to worry about the rent.

We live in an age where the word "therapy" has been stripped of its clinical weight and repurposed as a marketing tag for literally anything that provides a momentary hit of dopamine. Bought a new mechanical keyboard? Therapy. Spent three hours scrolling through a TikTok feed of people pressure-washing their driveways? Therapy. For Sanon, a woman whose face is currently plastered across half the billboards in Mumbai, cutting her hair is a way to signal to her 57 million followers that she, too, feels the weight of existence. She’s just like us. Only with better lighting and a PR team that knows exactly when to hit "publish."

The video is a classic piece of "relatability" theater. It’s shot with that specific, high-definition graininess that screams I’m being raw right now. You see the scissors. You see the falling locks. You see the wide-eyed expression of a woman reclaiming her narrative. But let's be real about the friction here. A haircut at the level of a Bollywood A-lister isn’t a trip to the local barber. It’s a choreographed event. It costs more than your monthly car payment, and it’s managed by people whose entire job is to ensure the "messy look" doesn't actually look messy.

The trade-off is obvious. By branding a routine grooming session as mental health maintenance, the celebrity machine cheapens the actual, grueling work of psychological repair. Actual therapy is boring. It’s expensive in a way that doesn’t result in a cute Instagram reel. It involves confronting the parts of yourself that don’t look good in a ring light. Sanon’s "therapy" is an aesthetic choice disguised as an emotional one.

There’s a specific irony in the tech that carries this message. We consume these "refreshing" moments through the very devices that are making us miserable in the first place. Your iPhone pings with a notification: Kriti Sanon shares new look. You click. You spend thirty seconds watching a stylized version of self-care. The algorithm notes your engagement. It feeds you more. Suddenly, you aren't just looking at a haircut; you’re looking at a lifestyle product you can’t afford, sold to you as a solution for a burnout that the app itself helped create.

It’s a feedback loop of performative wellness. Sanon gets the engagement. The salon gets the tag. The fans get a fleeting sense of intimacy with a stranger. And the actual definition of "therapy" continues to slide toward meaninglessness. We’ve reached a point where we don’t want to fix our problems; we just want to change our silhouettes.

Consider the price tag of this particular brand of healing. A top-tier stylist in a metro city isn't just charging for the cut. They’re charging for the NDAs, the studio space, and the specific brand of ego-stroking that comes with the territory. When Sanon says it's therapy, she’s right in one sense: it’s a controlled environment where she is the absolute center of the universe. That’s a luxury most people don’t get, even when they’re paying a licensed professional $150 an hour to talk about their childhood.

The tech industry loves this stuff. Platforms like Instagram and Reels thrive on these bite-sized "revelations." They need the "new me" narrative to keep the scroll going. If celebrities just said, "I was bored and my split ends were a disaster," the engagement would crater. Instead, we get the language of healing. We get the "journey." We get the curated vulnerability of a woman who knows exactly which angle makes her look most "liberated."

It’s a cynical play, but an effective one. In the attention economy, a haircut isn't just a haircut—it's a pivot. It's a way to reset the brand without having to do the actual work of changing the product. Sanon’s new bob will likely lead to a series of "fresh" photo shoots, a few brand deals for hair serum, and a flurry of articles like this one.

We’re all complicit in this. We watch the video. We like the post. We argue in the comments about whether she looked better with long hair or if the short cut "suits her personality." We treat a celebrity’s vanity as a communal event, as if her choice to prune her hair somehow validates our own need for a change.

But at the end of the day, when the ring light goes off and the floor is swept clean, she’s still a movie star with a new look, and you’re still staring at a screen, waiting for the next notification to tell you how to feel about yourself.

If cutting six inches of hair is therapy, does that make the hair stylist a doctor, or just a very expensive technician in the business of maintaining the facade?