Hair.

This is ridiculous. How can the state of my hair have such a total effect on my mood? How can it be that a good hair day is in some fundamental sense a good day and a bad hair day is a bad day?

It's a mystery and a humiliation. Especially for someone who has always aspired, or pretended, to be beyond all that.

I guess this has been going on since I was about twelve. I wrote in my diary one day that year that I didn't want to go to school because I couldn't get my hair to do what I wanted it to and it made me look "babyish." I remember crying with frustration.

There were years in between when I gave up -- either whacked it off short or let it swell into a shapeless mass in the summer humidity. Nobody ever taught me how to take care of it -- how to get the right kind of haircut for coarse, thick, wavy hair, how to use "product." My mother was (still is) a great natural beauty who didn't have to do a thing to be ravishing, and so she never learned or transmitted any of the arts that the rest of us need to feel presentable. It took till I was 40 to grow out of her shadow and begin to feel attractive (paradoxically, just in time for time to make me less so). I began to dream I was the pretty woman instead of the pudgy, plain, wistful one she was being mean to.

I got my first pretty-good haircut in my 40s, and my first great haircut in my late 50s. My mother, knowing it would cheer me up in my drab situation, and perhaps in penance for lost time, started giving me gift certificates for inexcusably expensive haircuts at Bumble & bumble, which had been recommended by her gay hairdresser and dear friend (a great guy who also cut my grandmother's hair and has cut mine and most of my sisters'; he's given to oracular, spot-on pronouncements like "Your whole family hides behind the intellect"). The very first time I happened to get one of their best (and most expensive) stylists, a poignantly innocent artist who cuts and plays with hair as if it was sculpture, and who actually travels around teaching other people how to do it. And damned if we didn't also bond in the ancient and honorable relationship of a woman and her gay hairdresser, and exchange intimate confidences while he revels in the almost metallic properties of my hair.

So here I am, almost 60, and for the first time in my life I really know what a good hair day is. The problem is, that just makes the bad ones all the worse. It's worse, too, because now my hair is pretty much all I have left -- the last vestige of female potency. It's a thick, streaky, pewter-and-silver-colored mass, and B&b's wonderful sprays and goos make deep waves in it. But when I don't have time to get it cut, or when I run out of "product," as has been happening lately, it reverts to a shapeless mass and falls in my face. On those days I feel ungainly, irritable and out-of-sorts, like I've turned back into a pumpkin. Give me a tube of the right goo, and I undergo a Cinderella-like transformation. I walk differently, smile differently, toss my head. I'm inside the image.

Know what I mean? Is this strickly a girl thang, or is there an equivalent for men?

Comments

[Tom Strong]

I'll tell you this: I sometimes have bad beard days. And they are no fun.

[amba]

Hmmm. I'm trying to imagine what a bad beard day is. Can one get "bed beard"?

[Tom Strong]

Yes! If I sleep on it the wrong way, the hair gets pushed up uncomfortably. And when my beard is long, it shows.

[amba]

And then you feel out of sorts??

[Tom Strong]

Yes. I end up pulling on my beard all day, trying to uncrinkle it. I'm ordinarily fidgety enough, but it becomes obsessive.

[amba]

Then I guess there's the whole question of whether or not you even have a beard, and if you feel exposed without one, etc.

(For some reason this reminds me of a silly conversation I once had with my brother Ally:

Me: Ew, imagine having hair growing out of your face every day!

Him: You think that's weird! You guys bleed every month!

Me: (dismissively) Oh, that.)

[Charlie (Colorado)]

Heh.

After years of trying to figure out the hair thing -- long (which I hated, always), short (which didn't work in the 70's), parted, "julius caesar", the whole thing -- I finally gave up and shaved the sucker.

People (girls especially) loved it.

[karen]

I wouldn't know a good haircut if I had one! I've never been able to do anyting w/my hair- although hopefully my girls have better luck. I like my hair, but- I'm hopless in the *pretty* department. My hair is too slippery to stay in any form other than a ponytail.

Thank God my husband appreciates the fact I can milk cows- and i can pull a touke over my head about 7 months of the year. Bright orange touke, too.

I'd like to see Charlie's shaved head and Tom wild beard. Hair's pretty cool.

[realpc]

amba,
I know what you mean. You look very good in the photo, by the way. I have the same kind of hair, except I don't get hair cuts.
I hate worrying about how my hair looks, especially at over 50. However, you are right, we can't help it. Whenever I see I new kind of hair clip I have to buy it -- I must have a hundred, at least. Different things work on different days, depending on the weather.
I try to find reliable methods that are always fast, like a ponytail. But there are days when nothing seems to work.

[Steve]

"If you want a "Good" haicut come see me," my aunt said on Christmas. I replied this is the worst haircut I have ever had but it came from a $3 off coupon.

I have numerous bad beard days. I am not ambedextrous. Probably can't spell either. My wife has bad moustache days.
So, what my left hand cuts is not as good as my right. A hair "cutter" asked me, "Who cut your hair last?" Wondering who in her shop did the dirty deed?
Of course it was I, I replied.

[Charlie (Colorado)]

Photos off to Karen and Annie --- show some caution when opening them, women have been known to convulse or run screaming, and children to cry.

[reader_iam]

I just wish I had my OLD hair, not what it's morphed into, over a lot of years and now, especially, that I'm almost 45. At one time, I had great hair and was a nicely and naturally light golden blonde.

And why, unlike almost everyone else on either side of the family, did I go so gray so early? (Well, I have some ideas, but won't share.) My hairdresser, whom I love, said I was almost the youngest person on whom he's had to use graybusters (a formulation which helps gray/white hair hang onto color better, which it doesn't like to do).

On the other hand, I've gone RED, which really suits my personality better, in many ways, I think. Warms up the aging skin, too.

My husband has VERY tough hair with which to deal, and on top of it he has many cowlicks (my son inherited the the same cowlicks, in the same places, along with the exact shape of DH's head--I didn't contribute much physically to this child). Our hairdresser has done an amazing job, so much so that it has converted my husband to "product," even. That's something I would absolutely not have believed if you'd told me it 14 years ago.

And he won't let anyone else touch his hair (which strikes me as funny, somehow) or our son's.

Times change.