Does anyone actually like their hair?
Gimme a head with hair
Long beautiful hair
Shining, gleaming, Streaming, flaxen, waxen
Give me down to there hair
Shoulder length or longer
Here baby, there mama
Everywhere daddy daddy
Hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair
Flow it, show it
Long as I can grow it My hair
When I was growing up I had the stupidest hair ever. Well, still do, but it was rather harsh having to grow up with it.
A bit of personal history. My mother was half-Cree Indian with thick straight shiny gorgeous hair, the type most people dream of. My father was of Irish descent with a thin frizzy curly mop on his head. Guess whose hair I ended up inheriting???
So unfair! Also, my younger sister got the thick straight gorgeous Indian hair and spent years perming it so as to make it curly. Gaaaaaa!
I maintain I would have turned out a much more emotionally balanced and happy person had I been blessed with straight thick hair 😉 And I’m only partially kidding about that. I grew up with what amounted to having a demented looking poodle sitting on my head most of the time – which did no wonders for my already shaky self-esteem I can tell ya.
Anyhow, I was reminded of this today when I went out for my twice a year haircut. I’ve had the same haircut for about thirty years now – a simple chin length bob. The hairdresser spent about half an hour drying it straight and making me look fabulous … then the minute I walked out the door into humidity and heat and start sweating the ol’ poodle thing started happening again.
You will rarely see a photo of me without my so-called hair slicked back into a ponytail or a bun … it’s just too hideous to consider otherwise.
casa azahar 
Why do we define ourselves by how our hair looks? I spent my teenage years agonizing about my naturally curly hair. It was a time when long and straight was In. There were people who ironed their hair. (!) I was particularly devastated by the “Twiggy” phenomenon, due to the fact that I had the great misfortune to have hips and breasts a la Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. Horrible fate, indeed.
Now I am past menopause. My hair is going grey. I still have hips and breasts, although they don’t seem to be in quite the same place as they used to be (go figure). I have my hair trimmed every 6 weeks. It is almost waist length and I wear it in a braid. I am going to have most of my braid cut off in a couple of weeks to donate to Locks of Love. Then I will have to exercise the patience of Job with it while it gets long enough to keep contained and out of my hair. I mean face.
I no longer define myself by my looks. Now I worry about how many pounds of tomatoes I am getting as compared to my buddies, and whether or not my garden has weeds. I count the number of varieties of daffodils I have rather than how many ways I can style my hair.
Oh yeah, one last comment before I run off. One of the things I worried about when I was younger and perkier was if sex would stop being fun when I got older. I have found out I needn’t have wasted that energy worrying. Seems like the less you worry, the better it gets. Plus practice makes perfect or something.
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What is this hair of which you speak?
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Most fab haircut for me would be the usual straight chin-length bob with fringe (bangs) to offset my eyes … I doubt it. Unless there happens to be 0% humidity happening, fringe turns into a frizzy mess on my forehead and the rest of my so-called hair starts going all wonky and poodly too.
Fuck man, I don’t long for gorgeous thick tresses cascading down my back, just a bit of fringe and a decent haircut. Yet apparently this is also too much to wish for.
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Obviously I have given up, otherwise why the braid? If the edges start getting frizzy, I do the french braid thing on both sides to corral those loose ends. I have about three inches cut off every so often to keep the braid from getting so long that when I bend over to do massage it brushes on people. Otherwise, I don’t mess with it and try not to look in the mirror. A policy of “Out of sight, out of mind.” I’m too old to screw around with my hair. I have only so much energy to spare, and hair is one of the inessentials. I realize this makes me UnAmericanWoman.
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I’ve not come to gloat (well, actually I have but let’s pretend I haven’t :-P) but I love my hair, it’s one of the very few parts of me I’m completely happy with.
Provided I wash it, use conditioner and comb it once a day, it stays in wonderful condition, fluffy and shiny. The colour is a bit all over the place, especially now its started going grey, and seems to change colour the longer it gets, going from a very dark brown when its short, to a light brown, almost strawberry blond when it gets long.
I’m like you az, I get it cut twice a year. Let it get shoulder length, then get it cut to a short back and sides when the hair can fill my eyes, ears and nose all at the same time, which can be a pain in the arse when I cycling. The only part I don’t like is the middle when it’s between short, which is low-maintenence, and long when it just looks lovely.
Nyah nyah!
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Grey hair, Iago? Hell, yer not even old enough to recognise the Hair quote in the first post!
I didn’t start getting even a few grey strands until I was 40, though I usually like colouring my hair anyhow twice a year (to go along with the haircuts) because I just like my hair much darker than it’s natural mousy brown colour … been doing this since I was about 25.
Anyhow, stop gloating … YOUR DAY WILL COME!
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I recognised the quote – I understand some old things, just not many. I actually had grey hairs before I started shaving, if you can believe that. Not many, but more than an 18 year old should have
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I had a grey hair once, some years ago, and I was the only person who noticed. There are advantages to being blond sometimes. (People don’t expect you to know much, for a start.)
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I have awful hair. It is as soft and fine as a baby’s and totally straight. It’s also a blah color. My hair has alweays been the bane of my existence. And every time I find someone who does a really good job of cutting it, she up and moves to Jamica or someplace. *pity party*
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Hair, don’t talk to me about hair!
Lately, I’ve been noticing that my hair is falling out. Really. The roots are so small that when it gets down to, well, where it is now (shoulder-length), it falls out due to it’s own weight! I’ll be sitting at the computer, and feel a slight touch on my arm and realize that it’s a loose hair, not a cat.
Time for my hair cut, I think. My hair was so long when I was younger. Fortunately, I’ve got the same situation as Ivan, strawberry blonde and gray, which passes for highlights. 🙂
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My hair is…strange. At the back, it grows up at the bottom. Where it meets the normal, downward-growing hair, about 2/3 of the way down, there’s a sort of tectonic plate effect whereby it forms a mountain ridge. It’s best to keep it short (No. 2 shave) – in which case where the two growth area meet there’s a slight gap, making it look like a fashionable, urban razor cut. I also have two ‘double crowns’ on top – sort of crop circles that make my hair stick up like the tufts on an Emperor Penguin.
My brother’s hair follows the same pattern, as does the elder of my son’s. My son also has an irregularly shaped skull – the result of being in an incubator for five weeks. My brother, though, is going bald and increasingly resembles Tony Blair. I’m fairly confident that I will die with a full head of hair (as did my maternal grandfather) – although I’m increaingly alarmed at every vist to the barber at how much grey is showing. (Billy Connolly: “They didnae tell me your pubes go grey!”)
I also have exceptionally thick hairs. My mother told me that when I was young it was like shampooing a coconut mat. But I shall spare you descriptions of my copious body hair. Hey – I am a bonobo!
Worst haircut ever: (cringe) I volunteered as a model for a haidressing college. I said “Give me a Morrissey.”
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I have lovely hair. Somewhat insane, with a tendency to escape from braids and buns and stand up on end and wave about in a happy lively sort of way, but lovely, soft, curly, shiny chestnut hair floating all the way down to nearly my waist. I adore it. So of course a lot of it fell out last winter, just to really really wind me up. There’s nothing like seeing your own pink scalp peeking through to give a girl the absolute heebie-jeebies. And that’s when I realised how much I loved it.
My mother has shiny black straight hair, my Dad has (had) a great curly cloud of light hair. I inherited from both. I spent my childhood being told what a nuisance my hair was and having it cut off short (not good, it always stood up on end, so I looked like a bewildered dandelion at all times). I wanted long hair so badly. In my teens I got control of my person and refused to get it cut, to a chorus of relations telling me it looked such a mess and I needed to cut it off (and school-teachers sending me out of class to go and brush it and re-plait it). But I was rebelling, so there. And then I discovered boys, and without exception, every single boy I ever did so much as exchange smiles with had something nice to say about the hair. It became the defining thing – that girl with the hair.
I felt utterly unattractive when it went away. Considering the family rate of greying and thinning, I was expecting another good 20 years out of it. And it made me realise that I did love it and I was lucky to have had it at all, and that my family are the most bizarre bunch of envy-driven neat-freaks.
Luckily it started growing back in, and now I have endless wisps and new curls coming in amongst the longer stuff, and frizz to deal with, just as I did when I started growing it as a teenager (I am still expecting someone to send me out of the room to brush it again).
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I grew up as a very short haired girl. Mum considered long hair to be to much of a fuzz, and until I developed “curves” the first impression new people got of me was that I was a boy. Of course I started to grow my hair when I moved out of Mum´s in my mid teens.
I never thought hair was an important part of a person until I was in my mid twenties. When my 2nd son was a year and a half my waist long hair was a real mess so I went to the hair dresser for the first time in ages and had it cut to shoulder length. When I came back home and stepped into the garden DJ began to cry, and didn´t stop until I started to talk to him. Then he said “Mummy” and ran into my arms. Obviously he hadn´t recognised me.
I kept my hair rather short the following ten years and started to grow it the year after I got this job. Long hair is very unconveniant in the operating theatre. After a few years it was almost down to the waist again. Four years ago I had a close encounter with the neurosurgeons and my head was shaved bald – apart from a tiny braid in the neck. It took another six months until I was ready to loose that one and start all over again.
Since then my hair has been very short mostly, but has had many colours. Black, red, blonde, brown… often in combinations and I´ve also had patterns cut.
At the moment I´m blonde, a few nuances paler than my natural one.
…and I just HATE to be looked upon as a bimbo because of my natural blondeness…
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My mother always cut my hair short because I have both thin and curly hair, and she liked thick and straight, like my sister’s. Now I keep it about shoulder length. It’s gotten a LOT thinner because of the steroids and the thyroid problem. It’s reddish brown, wispy, and curly in all the wrong ways. I use a curl enhancing gel to keep it from getting “too” wispy. If it’s humid, I look like I’ve been licked by a cow or something.
Oh, and I have about a million gray hairs now. I’d cover them up with some nice natural hair colorant, but I’m too lazy to drag myself down to the basement to use the utility sink, so the colorant has been sitting in my bathroom cabinet for months.
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I dye mine in the bathroom using L’Oreal Creme something or other, which doesn’t splash all over the place.
Meanwhile, the most recent haircut has coincided with me needing a new passport … and new passport photo. And since I only get my hair cut twice a year it’s usually a bit too short for the first few weeks. Dang! Not that my passport photos are ever anything less than hideous, but I at least try to get the hair! as normal looking as possible.
The other thing about my hair! being shorter now is that it is way more frisky looking in the mornings, especially with all this HEAT going on.
I remember someone with similar ‘hair issues’ telling me her husband once told her it was like waking up with a different woman every morning. 🙂
Another time I remember sitting up in bed first thing in the morning and I could just tell things weren’t okey-dokey in the hair department. So I said to Nog – ‘What’s my hair doing?’ and he replied ‘Actually, it looks like it’s trying to escape’.
What can I say…it ain’t easy being me. 😉
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az, my sympathies! And Reed, I’m so glad it’s growing back in. 🙂
What do you (or y’all as case may be!) do when you’ve gone mad and cut bangs which you then hate and have to grow out?
I’ve tried barrettes, bobby pins, a headband (on me, yikes!), and anything else I can do to avoid having strangers wonder if it’s bangs growing out or if I’ve had some terrible accident…:?
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Reed, I had a ‘going bald’ scare last year when I suddenly realised I was, um going bald. Well, okay, not bald bald but it was definitely thinnning out on top. A bit like adding insult to injury (or vice versa?). And then of course I started noticing all these ‘slightly older than myself’ BALD women in the streets here – surely they had always been there but I was suddenly noticing them and thinking – eep! that’s ME a few years down the road. But happily the thinning thing seems to have calmed down a bit.
Glad to hear yours is growing back.
SC, not sure what one does about that ‘in between’ stage when one is growing our their fringe (bangs). In my case a few years ago I just slicked it back with the rest of my hair! … because it’s so baby fine it is easy to plaster down/back with a bit of spray gel.
Meanwhile, in that one photo I have of you I think you look very good with bangs. In fact, I kind of envied you being able to have them as all my attempts at having fringe ends up with me looking like I have the flying spaghetti monster coming out of my forehead. I mean, being touched by his noodly appendage is one thing, but having him take up permanent residence on your head is … well …
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Bangs are okay on me … for the 15-20 days before they’re crawling in my eyes, and trying to wrap themselves around my optic nerve! 😉
Speaking of the FSM, I have instructions for knitting an idol of He to make into an ear-flap hat — want one? (missingevilgrinsmiley)
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hey ya
when i was lil my hair was wavey and then it went straight and then a couple of years ago i got my hair cut shorter the normal and now my hair a a wavey los curl type thing and i like it
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I have grown increasingly to loathe my hair recently, which is why I intend to get a haircut today, in fact, if I can just explain to the haircutter how I want it cut. “Shorter, like a guy’s, but not really close to my head, just… not long. You know, kind of computer-geeky” is something that is not going to make much sense, I fear.
Hair, though, is one of my favourite musicals. I am fond of singing along loudly.
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Is it really, echo? I have to admit to having Hair earworms since posting this.
Meanwhile, my recent chin-length bob cut tends to look totally fabulous when still wet and brushed back behind my ears … if only I could get it to stay looking that way when it dried!
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