Manes and Banes
“Never underestimate the halo of confidence a freshly coiffed mane brings”.
I read an article a few years ago and this sentence, I have always carried around in my back pocket. It can be unpacked in so many different ways. So why is this sentence so significant you may ask? Well since I can go on and on about the why, I should perhaps stick to just 1 or 2, else we could be here until Sunday.
Just as fashions change and seasons change – we change. Why rock the same old boring hairstyle? Hair is the one thing that is on display every single day and a stunning accessory right? It frames our faces, highlights our best facial features, it can be styled in so many ways, it can be coloured and the list goes on – and I know more often than not, we are not entirely happy with the head of hair we were dealt. Oh – I was one of them; thankfully, I am so over it and now happily share my eye-rolling adventures and the tales of my tresses.
A haircut is as good a holiday they said. THEY were wrong. A$$HOLES. (I agree now of course).
So I showed up in this beautiful world with a brown bush of curls – lovely shiny curls, which my mom tied up in ribbons and they happily bounced around my shoulders and down my back as I played with my dolls and tea set and then later pretended that I was super girl gliding through the sky. As one does when you are five years old – and you think that Jesus and your daddy are the strongest men in the entire world. Those blissful childhood years.
Fast forward to 1990 – my first year of high school – where on the first day I realised, ‘Dorothy was not in Kansas anymore”. Things had changed. Things had to change. I was in a different world, and so I met that pesky little thing called peer pressure. (I wish that they included a paragraph about how to handle peer pressure in the prospectus handed out upon registration! It would have just made the next 5 years better). Here started the love and hate relationship with hair – two horns on the same goat! Here I noticed that if one girl started rocking a particular hairstyle – everyone else had to sport it. I remember spending hours trying to French braid my hair – until I couldn’t feel where my arms actually joined the rest of my body – but after 3 days and a truckload of f’s, I mastered it.
Then of course – in the early 90’s we didn’t have flat irons – and so when it rained or even worse – those misty mornings, most of us had tightly coiled buns with an arsenal of hair pins. Folks – then came the gel; people understand, the 90’s was ALL about the gel. You guessed it, I was on the gel wagon… and it would take a few tank loads of warm water to wash all the goo out of my hair. Then of course the sleek shiny locks. For me, it became so ‘real’ when I heard a conversation between two boys in my class… going around the class and discussing hair and what they didn’t like about girls and the one said “I hate when that girl’s hair is untidy in the front and it just sits there… like tree branches…”. I was thankful at that moment that it wasn’t me and promised myself that it would never be.
With the college years, come even more challenges… here no one cares what your hair looks like or what you wear – everyone walks around on their own mission. Here I started experimenting… and brace yourself for the worst hairstyle in the history of the world!!! I still cringe and break out in a light glistening sweat. My eyes are watering right now.
It was 1997 – my 3rd and last year of study and a classmate convinced me that cutting my long hair into LAYERS would be just lovely. So off I went (without even a second thought or without running the idea up the flagpole) – to a little ‘home’ hairdresser and asked “please cut my hair into layers”… I didn’t say (and how was I to know) long layers, keep the length… she took to my hair with a scissors and with expert haste – the only way I can explain, the cut actually looked like it was cut with pruning shears or even a broken bottle neck and the layers she had in mind – short layers on the top with a long piece left untouched in the back – yes people, I had a mullet… a bad 80’s lion-king-looking hairstyle. This was before my fortuitous possession of the modern convenience known as the GHD. When my mom saw me – her look said it all… it would take 54 years for my hair to be normal… When my friend said “that is such a bad hairstyle, I am not going out with you in public”, I knew that it was bad. Had no choice but to let the consequences spill where they will. Irrevocable personified!
Note to my 19 year old self – don’t cut your hair… in winter… when you need to use public transport, on misty mornings… with zero blow drying skills!
It took about 2 years for it to grow out and boy was I relieved. It felt like I had been released from prison, enslaved by a bad haircut. So in the years to follow, I experimented with all colours. At one point – I had a fuchsia mane… seriously, when the midday sun floodlit my crown chakra, I swear that I could be seen from Jupiter, Saturn and Mars – but I LOVED it!
Who can forget the majestic quandary I found myself in – on the day I had the worst hair day ever… and I am talking about ever! I decided to take a quick trip to the mall – hung over – to get something. I say something because I just don't remember what. Then as I, less than gracefully, head down the shampoo aisle, I bump into an ex-boyfriend, with his beautiful raven-haired goddess of a girlfriend on his arm… and I just stood there, defensively and with so much self-loathing reach for my inside out party hair which I acquired at the previous night’s foam party where I was the star of the show (and where I was helping Fat Man Scoop sing “put your hands up”, now here I am putting my hands up to hide my scrunched up weak hair line) and hearing my vodka laced voice whisper in my right ear, HOW THE F DID I GET HERE… I WANT TO GO HOME. I SHOULDN’T HAVE COME HERE.
This image of me will forever have her asking: “YOU DATED HER”??? (Insert moue here). I die for days.
So after my daughter was born in 2005, I was just lacklustre – a disenchanted ingénue. I decided, to get myself out of my funk, I would do a little colour at home – and I happily read the instructions on the box and decided, to hell with instructions. I will just keep the magic product on for perhaps 10 minutes longer… I had blonde rusty tufts all over and it eventually morphed into orange before breaking off… Sigh – will I ever learn???
As time moved me on into my 30’s I became less worried about trying to fit into the ever changing hair trends, and to just be natural. When the time eventually came to make a change that would send me into the next phase – I researched extensively, armed with expert blow drying skills, the most flattering hairstyles and the maintenance thereof, I eventually found a picture of Mariska Hargitay's hair – and I fell in love! So it became my new normal, the new me. I moved forth boldly.
Coco Chanel understood well when she said “when a woman changes her hairstyle, she is about to change her life”. It is liberating and like all things in life – we live and learn. Your hair can be your best friend or worst enemy, you have to find the in between and embrace it. Some days are diamonds and some days are stones; and some days, your life and your hair is being held together with one bobby pin. Have fun with it nonetheless.
A woman’s bane indeed.