Is any woman satisfied with her hair? I think not.
It’s either too curly or too straight, too limp or too bushy, too thin or too thick, too short or too long. The wrong color. The wrong degree or location of curliness or straightness. We are on a never-ending mission to correct the perceived shortcomings of our own personal God-given heads of hair.
And everything we do about it is painful, expensive and time-consuming.
The scary part is we’re willing to try dozens of new tortures that are also painful, expensive and time-consuming. And we keep doing it, over and over and over, all our lives.
I’ve done everything possible to my hair except straighten it or shave it off. If I could recapture the time spent futzing with my hair I’d have another six or seven years of free time and maybe, by now, I’d have written the Great American Novel or invented a program that thwarts robocalls forever and punishes the robocallers appropriately.
When I was a child, my mother braided my long blondish-brownish hair into two fat braids and secured the ends with rubber bands. The hair nearly always got tangled in the bands and required painful removal techniques, sometimes involving scissors. For dressier occasions, my hair was unleashed and allowed to fall to my shoulders. It was kept out of my eyes and out of the soup with two or three large barrettes. My younger hair was so thick and straight and heavy, my mother occasionally chopped through chunks of it a with a thinning shears.
When I got to middle school and began to care passionately about my appearance, my girlfriends and I “set” our hair every night in pin curls. We separated small strands of hair, dipped our fingers in a bowl of water, wet the strands, wound each strand around a finger into a circle and secured it with crisscrossed bobby pins.
To keep the pin curls from unwinding while we slept, we wrapped scarves around our heads. The whole operation made sleeping mildly uncomfortable.
I got used to it.
The result was worth it: bouncy curls that lasted for hours, sometimes even until bedtime the next night when the whole procedure had to be repeated. If it was a humid day, or if it was a hot, sweaty summer day, or if I got caught in the rain, the curls lasted less than an hour.
I soon discovered permanents. A permanent is a two-step chemical treatment that puts curls where you want them, but they were supposed to last longer and avoid the nightly pin curl schedule. Perms involved dozens of smaller “spin” curlers, end papers, some smelly concoctions, a neutralizer and a lingering “perm odor” that hung in the air around your head for two or three days afterward. Permanents sometimes resulted in frizziness. To temper the frizz, we still slept on pin curls. With a permanent, your hairdo lasted longer – sometimes for a whole day even if it was hot and humid.
I got used to it.
In college, I had a page boy—a longer hairstyle with the ends curved under. I had to wet six or seven sections of my longer hair and place the dampened ends between heavy metal curlers. The curling contraption clamped together and when the hair dried, it curved under. I slept on those awful instruments of torture, but they were positioned farther down the length of my hair – almost to the shoulder -- so I could tuck them into the curve of my neck while I slept. They hurt only a little.
I got used to it.
For some of those college years I took my turn sleeping in the cold dorm. The room contained 10 bunk beds and there was no heat. The windows were left open, even in below zero weather. If you slept near a window, your blankets often had a dusting of snow on them in the morning. Sometimes my page boy-metal-curlers contraptions froze.
Along came brush rollers. I never could sleep on those, so I got up early, showered, sprayed my dry hair with hairspray, rolled the sticky hair around brush rollers, poked the rollers with a plastic pin, then ate breakfast, got dressed, unrolled my hair and went to class.
We had a professional hairdryer in my sorority house – the kind you’d see in hair salons. Dropping a quarter in the slot allowed you to sit under its huge hot, noisy helmet for a half hour. My hair was so thick, I needed two or three quarters to get ready for an important date. The hair dryer was so popular, we had a sign-up sheet and had to reserve time under it.
Just before my first child was born, I got streaked. Talk about painful! My hairdresser forced a tight rubber cap on my head. The cap was perforated with dozens of small holes. She pulled strands of hair through the holes with a crochet hook. Then she applied a bleaching compound just to those strands. I’d have to sit for 15 minutes with a plastic bag covering my head before she washed the bleach off and applied a toner. Removing that rubber cap was extremely painful.
I got used to it.
Every six weeks or so for most of my adult life, I had to spend more than half a day getting my hair cut, streaked and body-permed.
I got used to it.
Along came hot rollers and curling irons and blow dryers. But – because I am a woman – I was still not satisfied with my hair.
My hair is not so thick anymore. It’s gray. Naturally gray. I don’t color it, streak it, perm it, tease it or curl it. I wash it every morning while I’m in the shower and blow it dry.
Or not.