The Mane Drag : Having a Good Day or a Bad Day? Only Your Hairdresser Knows for Sure
SOMETIMES, I SUSPECT that the index for happiness lies not in the heart or the brain but in the follicles. There are good-hair days, when every curl bounces into place unbidden and I feel as if I can conquer the world. And there are bad-hair days, when each tress becomes possessed and I feel powerless and out of control.
Friends assure me that I’m not alone. “Hair determines my mood,” Marcella declares. “It makes my day or ruins it. And I always felt so silly saying that, until I found out my 97-year-old mother-in-law felt the same way. There’s just something about women and their hair.”
I wouldn’t draw the gender line. “Men are more hair-obsessed than women,” says Martin. “Every male who starts losing his hair gets totally nuts. They talk all the time about baldness. But once it goes, you can’t stop it.”
And to think Marcella gets anxious when she’s separated from her blow dryer. “I think of hair as being so crucial to a person’s happiness that when my husband wanted me to cut his hair with an electric clipper, I couldn’t do it,” she says. “It was a kind of a power that frightened me, like having to do brain surgery. A bad hairdo is such a desperate thing.”
She’s telling me, the ultimate bad-hair phobic? In the past 15 years, I’ve only trusted three stylists, and I’ve been known to go abroad with a schematic diagram, just in case I need an emergency trim. I keep my hair long, to avoid the emotional roller coaster of those fly-away, awkward in-between stages. The only time I ever do anything drastic is right before I’m about to end a long-term relationship, when I have my mane shorn dramatically to prove I’m willing to take a risk.
“Men are totally paranoid about getting their hair cut,” says Martin. “Do you know one major rock star except Elton John (or Phil Collins) who doesn’t have a lot of hair? That’s why men hate haircuts. They know they don’t have as much hair.” Gosh, and I’ve always assumed it had something to do with Samson.
My husband, Duke, sees it differently. “There used to be this nice masculine hangout--the barbershop--with magazines like Guns & Ammo and American Legion and maybe a piece of stuffed wildlife on the wall,” he says. “Some ex-boxer with a tattoo would cut your hair. It looked dreadful, but you felt like you’d gone through some masculine rite, like the Chumash sweat lodge. Now, you go to a unisex beauty parlor with ferns. DeeDee or Steffi asks, ‘Do you want mousse?’ A lot of men don’t know what to say.”
Still, hair neurotics are born, not made. Last night, I called Maggie. I could hear her 3-year-old daughter, Sheera, crying in the background. “Sheera doesn’t like her hair,” Maggie explained. “She wishes she had straight hair. When it began to curl, she said, ‘I don’t want it to do this.’ She stands in front of the mirror and screams.”
Made sense to me. I have thick, red curly hair. Twiggy being the role model when I was growing up, these ringlets were the scourge of my adolescence. I ironed them; I rolled them in frozen orange juice cans. Superficial girl that I was, if I could have had one wish from 12 to 22, it would have been to step out of the shower and have my hair dry straight.
“That’s really sad,” said Maggie. “I always wished I had curly hair. I guess Sheera’s starting early. There’s nothing I can do.”
Actually, with hair, there’s always something new you can do: extensions; cellophanes; air perms; magic shampoos that don’t just deep-clean--they restructure, humidify, bodify and/or volumize; hydro-activated molecularly systemized conditioners; anti-static detanglers; transfiguring sprays, each with a new purpose--and a new verb.
The beauty business has gotten so advanced that any day I expect to read about some amazing surgically implanted computer chip that highlights your hair before it grows out of your scalp. Claire, a faux blonde, would love that. “I can get depressed just by looking in the mirror,” she says. “If I see brown roots, I’m in trouble.”
Then again, some days are just bad-hair days. A while back, for example, there was a hot, dry 30-mile-an-hour Santa Ana wind blowing, and I’d been driving around in a convertible. I looked like a feral Hungarian mop dog, and I felt like one, too.
So I went to see my hairdresser, Gina. A third-generation stylist, Gina is the supreme hair-control freak. “I’ve been the hairstyling example all my life,” she laughs. “ ‘Look at that little first-grader with the asymmetrical cut,’ my teachers said. ‘God, she’s progressive.’ And all the other little girls were wearing ponytails.”
Gina anoints my hair with miracle glop and twists it into a windproof French braid. Life suddenly looks a little brighter. And lest you think men aren’t affected by such a change in coif . . . .
“Wow!” Duke exclaims when I return home. “Can I take you to dinner?”
