Hair Rules
That beautiful tresses are invariably linked with sexual desirability has this author reminiscing about the pains she took to make every day a good-hair day.
By Trudy Whitman
What is it about hair? Through fairytales – “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your long hair!” – and Bible stories (think Sampson’s undoing) we learn at an early age about the power and importance of hair. Later we are exposed to rhapsodic literary passages by writers striving to capture in words the shimmering hue or perfect curl of a true love’s tresses. By snipping off, without her consent, a tiny ringlet of Belinda’s hair, the Baron prompts a drawing-room battle of the sexes in Alexander Pope’s mock epic poem The Rape of the Lock. But how could the scissors-happy Baron possibly resist after beholding Belinda floating down the Thames on her way to Hampton Court, her “smooth Iv’ry Neck” highlighted by her “Shining Ringlets”?
Graphic artists through the ages have been no less obsessed with hair. In Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” a goddess is offered to the world on the half-shell, her nakedness glorified by knee-length golden hair. Toulouse-Lautrec piled the tresses of his dance-hall doxies in high-frothy coifs of brilliant orange or yellow. Even when hair is conspicuously covered, as modesty required for Vermeer’s light-infused portraits of women, their ornate white headdresses only call attention to the lovely stuff that’s hidden from sight.
No sense in beating around the bush: Beautiful hair is sexy. Or, as Pope put it elsewhere, “Fair tresses man’s imperial race ensnare / And beauty draws us with a single hair.”
I was blessed with good hair. Thick, shiny, almost black, it had a slight wave that could adapt to almost any style. During the teenage angst years, I might have seen myself as plump, pale, and pimply, but I never suffered a bad-hair day. Never. Mr. Ernest, my hairdresser, plus vats of hairspray, saw to that. I devoted countless hours to shampooing and sitting under the portable hairdryer that was a fixture in the bedrooms of teenaged girls in the early 1960s.
We were then, as girls are now and probably always will be, slaves to fashion, and in modern lifetimes it is the film industry that frequently dictates what is fashionable. When Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, and Shirley MacLaine began appearing on screen in the late 1950s with short do’s, my mother had my ponytail lopped off. That was the last decision she ever made about my hair, although she was never shy about expressing an opinion about anything else.
Depending on what was “in,” I slept on bristly rollers or with vampish curls Scotch-taped to the sides of my face at night. Or both rollers and Scotch tape. A big hair craze hit in the ’60s (remember the beehive?), so we all started backcombing. Some girls created scraggly messes and broken ends. My hair never winced. Film star Ali MacGraw did much to promote the parted-down-the-middle and straight-as-sticks look, which made my friends with waves resort to flattening their hair with clothes irons. But I preferred the shaggy cut that Jane Fonda popularized. I could have had the Ali MacGraw, though, if I’d wanted it, because my friends and I all went off to college with hairpieces called falls.
Alas, by the time Barbra Streisand popped up in the movies with her straight hair transformed by a curly perm – and I had followed Barbra in the foul-smelling process – I knew my hair was getting ready to pull a dirty trick on me. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t been forewarned. A favorite family story involves my mother sending a concerned letter to my father when he was in the Pacific during World War II. She had heard, she wrote, that soldiers who contracted a certain tropical disease were losing clumps of hair. “It’s graying, but it’s staying,” was his response.
Not far into my 20s I, too, began to gray. For one who had never had a bad-hair day, a bad-hair gene was a disaster.
Unwilling as I was to become a slave to Loving Care at such an early age, it took a few more years and a comment from an old friend I hadn’t seen in a while to inspire action: “I like your hair,” he said. “It goes with your face.”
The following week I was in the bathroom struggling with a drooling bottle of hair color. About a dozen ruined towels later, I decided to put my head in the care of a professional, one who could reproduce my natural raven-colored locks.
This stage lasted about ten years, and then two things happened: My eyelids swelled every time I had my hair colored, and some health experts began questioning the safety of the dye. Suddenly I started to notice how attractive, even regal-looking, some gray-haired women could look.
Could the Hair Princess pull off going gray? What would it do to my self-image? Would I ever feel sexy again? What would my mother say? Reservations placed bravely on the back burner, I stopped coloring and allowed my hair to grow shoulder-length. I also enhanced my natural wave with gobs of mousse. The effect was similar to Elaine’s long, curly do on the Seinfeld show – except mine was a salt-and-pepper version.
The reaction was mixed. I was afraid my son was going to ask me please not to bother visiting him at summer camp. But kudos to my husband, who never pressured me to go back to the bottle. Most friends and acquaintances professed to like the change, although I wondered if that’s how they truly felt. A perfect stranger on the subway told me my style was “stunning.”
And me? Some days good, some days bad. I clearly thought about it too much, and frequently wished I were living in China, where veteran souls are revered. I dreamt about it, too – classic midlife crisis dreams like the one about being the object of derision in a roomful of adolescent boys.
And the gray was growing. As I became more salty and less peppery, my I’m gray and I’m proud attitude became more a front than a true credo. When the bad days began outnumbering the good, I knew it was time to break up with my silver-haired self. So without telling a soul, I made an appointment at a new salon. “Cut it off,” I told the hairdresser, “and make me a blonde.” I showed her a photograph of Hillary Clinton. “I want Hillary’s hair,” I said.
My husband was dumbstruck when he came home from the office that night. “You look like the girl I married,” he said, stunned.
Trying to stay gray was a noble experiment, but how could I go back after a comment like that? I knew it would take a stronger soul than mine to buck a culture in which babes aren’t gray, and to disappoint my husband.
The regimen of a highlighted blonde is neither easy nor inexpensive. It’s a time-consuming, numbingly tiresome process that ties one to the supplier. But, hey, what price beauty, or at least the illusion of a younger, more desirable self?
In the final canto of The Rape of the Lock, Belinda demands that the Baron return her clipped curl. Sadly, it is nowhere to be found, and a muse suggests it has risen up into the heavens: “This lock, the Muse shall consecrate to Fame/And mid’st the Stars inscribe Belinda’s name!”
I like to think of one of my own formerly dark and lustrous curls floating up there in hair heaven. It’s over there. Do you see it? My dearly departed lock is the star right next to Belinda’s legendary golden ringlet, helping hers to light up the night sky.
