Your hair – crowning glory or worst nightmare?
Mine has always been the bane of my existence. What is known in Spain as “pelo frito”. Fine and frizzy with a mind of its own and the plaything of even the slightest touch of humidity. All my life I have dreamed of having straight hair and cannot even begin to count the hours spent – nay wasted – with gels & sprays, tape, giant rollers, blowers & straighteners, hairbands & hats. All for nothing. When I was about 12 my father finally gave in to my constant pleas and paid to have my hair professionally straightened at a salon. Within a week my hair was back to its usual disagreeable self.
I longed to be one of those happy souls who could just wash their hair and go outside without further ado, or who could get caught in the rain, secure in the knowledge that they wouldn’t end up looking like they had a demented poodle sitting on their heads. In the 80s I watched in horror as women who had been blessed with the hair of my dreams got hideous perms that made them look, well, like me. Around that time I tried letting my hair dry while gelled back in a ponytail, but after its release from captivity would immediately spring back to its despised life. So in the end I just kept it gelled back and have been mostly wearing it that way for the past 25 years, except on rare days with 0% humidity or those few blessed hours immediately after having my hair cut and blow-dried to smithereens.
Yesterday was such a day. And it was soooo lovely while it lasted, that all too brief and bittersweet glimpse of what might have been…
casa azahar 
My hairdresser says we all desire the hair we don’t have. I had stick-straight, fine, copious blonde hair until I went through chemo, whereupon I got wavy, fine, copious blonder hair. After, of course, the unpleasant interval of having a head shaped like Machu Picchu. And I just cut most of it off.
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I’m lucky having a son who’s an ex-hairdresser and is willing to blow dry mine straight every week.
Otherwise I’d be another frizzy kinkster
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You have to just love and accept you! I personally think that curly hair is so much more sexy, and alluring. That could be my nostalgia for the 80’s or maybe my half Italian roots. Get it?… roots..haha
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“a head shaped like Machu Picchu”
That was one of those lucky-I-wasn’t-drinking-coffee moments. 🙂
I didn’t get to have the lush after-chemo grow back that everyone talks about because my hair didn’t fall out. It just got thinner and broke off. Figures.
At least your hair is nice and thick and has some weight to it, nursemyra, so that it will stay put after straightening. My hair defies gravity.
Curls I could live with, Scott. It’s the just-stuck-my-finger-in-a-socket look that I find so unappealing.
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I always wanted more curl to my hair. My hair is quite straight, but gets a bit wavy on humid days. For me, it’s the dry air that makes for bad hair days. I can’t stand the static I get in dry days of winter, with the hair cling to my cheeks.
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in a fit of wanting to do something different in January, I dyed my hair black. I did like it and it looked pretty good on me, but it took huge quantities of dye to even cover the top bits, let alone all the underneath-bits and the bottom-bits. And my roots grew back looking grey and horrid, so I quickly realised that black would take more colour maintenance than I was happy to do, so then started the process of correcting it. I’ve chopped off some length, had it stripped and recoloured at the hairdressers and it’s still an odd patchy look – it’s mostly brown, but some bits are a lot darker than others.
Here’s where I was particularly clever though – feeling embarrassed about my workmanship in the dye, when I went to the hairdressers for the correction, I told them it had been done for my art (school) something or other. Groan.
My hair is long, fine, thick and wavy / frizzy. I use John Frieda frizz ease shampoo & conditioner and that does seem to help. Other than that, I just leave it in some sort of updo, usually – hides it…
It’s either that or learning to love it.
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I did this once with a black henna and ended up looking like Elvis. Took ages to get it back to the usual mousy brown.
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Myhair is completely the opposite… So fine (though I have lots of it) that barrettes, elastics, and headbands and other hair-control devices simply slid out or off. Combined with a head that seems to reject hats and scarves (They just “sproing” off my head), My hair just hangs there. It isn’t even the sort of hair that you can flip over your shoulder. It just hangs in my face and annoys me. I also have a nervous habit where I pull it and often end up with a little bald spot. A short haircut is my only option.
Back in the day of teasing and bouffants, my friend Carol used to force me to put curlers in at night (those bottle-brush ones held in with big plastic pins). I would lie there in agony all night and in the morning, she would tease it and spray it with a couple of cans of heavy-duty hairspray and within minutes of leaving the house it would be completely flat… and very, very sticky.
I don’t think anyone has “perfect hair” but I always wanted naturally curly hair that I could tie a scarf around and just forget about it.
In fact, Mom just recently told me that when I was born, I had kinky, kinky blonde hair. One morning, my Mom found it all on my pillow and what grew back was fine, fluffy down, so blonde I looked bald. My hair darkened over the years but on occasion, I find the odd kinky hair.
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oh yes, this is definitely one of those “We all want what we don’t have” situations. Although that’s hardly surprising since almost nobody has naturally perfect straight or curly hair – most of us seem to be somewhere in that annoying middle ground of “not quite straight and not quite curly, but a bit kinky in places you don’t want kinks and full of enough static electricity to power a small town”.
I’m having a bad hair day today, too. I’ve been caught in the rain and wind twice today already and its only lunchtime. So I basically have a head which looks like its been dragged through a hedge…
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I just thought of a new word. “Az-fro.”
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😛
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I think woo is right when she says almost nobody has perfect curly or perfect straight hair. Everyone I know with curly hair uses tons of PRODUCT to get it looking “natural”, and straight hair usually has kinks or is fly away.
I have met people with perfect hair though, and it’s very hard not to hate them.
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