So anytime someone gets a significantly different haircut, gains or loses quite a bit of weight, changes hair color, grows or removes facial hair, or adopts contacts instead of glasses (or the other way around), he or she needs to trot down to the DMV and ask for a new picture and a new driver's license? Riiight.
Umm, yeah, I think if it makes a 'significant' difference in your apperence, then yes. I'm pretty sure the law (actually its not the law, its an administrative regulation) requires that your ID should, in fact, resemble you. A haircut might be extreame, but yeah if you gained or lost a lot of weight, underwent some real plastic work on your face, then yeah, you should do it. But I had a real problem at one point in my life with some cop on the side of the road in the middle of the night because when my DL pix was taken I was still doing corporate work, short hair, way square glasses, and way, way, overweight. By the time the LEO and me were having our roadside chat I had hair down to my shoulder, rock and roll Rayban frames, and was an easy 60 pounds lighter, and I have to agree with him, I looked nothing like the picture on the DL.
It's probably one of those things that's no big thing until someone won't accept it and it becomes a huge thing. Because, that DL is about the only way you have to prove that you are you, and if the cop ain't buying it, its going to take a couple of hours out of your life trying to prove it. That being said, I bet almost no one does it. Like the old Dylan line that went:
Up on the white veranda
She wears a necktie and a Panama hat
Her passport shows another face
From another time and place
She looks nothing like that
And all the remnants of her recent past
Are scattered in the wild wind
