Can't touch this: the price of good hair

Who wants to be a bouffhead?

The New York Times fashion page has been a dry well in my search for wankery over the past couple of weeks. After fruitlessly scanning this week's contributions I went to the Guardian's 'Lifestyle & Health' section to see what was new. Wherever there is fashion you will find wankers of the highest order, as the article by Paula Cocozza on the return of the big blow-dry proves:

On the journey back to blow-drying, hair has undergone an intensive commercialisation. For every twist and turn through texture to sleekly straight and now volume, a new array of potions has been devised and dispatched to the chemist's shelf. Tigi alone, from Toni & Guy, estimates it launches 10 new products a year. Many cater to our needs with such incredible specificity that their names seem like fictions: hqhair.com is currently selling Smoothing Lusterizer, Hot Style Constructor and Membrane Gas ("more than just a hairspray").

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According to a survey last autumn, the average British woman spends almost £25 [AUD $62.41] a month on shampoos and hair-care products.

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Don't touch blow-dried hair. If you need to get it out of your eyes, flick it by moving your head.

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To make your blow-dry last, don't wash your hair the next day. Use dry shampoo instead. Sleep on a silk pillow. Or wear a hairnet (though this might undo the psychological boost of having the blow-dry in the first place). Avoid rain and humidity. [Avoid rain? In London? Good one! -S]

I don't want to disparage the magic that a good hairdresser can work on a wayward head of hair. I have naturally 'bendy' hair- curly enough that it will never be straight, and straight enough that it will never be curly. I suppose you could describe it as 'wavy' if you were being charitable, but to me 'waves' conjure up an image of something rather more ordered.

When I was working and we had quite a bit more money than we do now, Gam insisted I should have the luxury of seeing a 'proper' hairdresser. I have a natural distrust of hairdressers due to the fact that the first one I ever went to (when I was probably 14 or so) gave me a haircut that should never have been inflicted on anyone. It was impossible to do anything with it and took what seemed like an age to grow out. In boarding school, once it grew long enough, I took to pinning it down with bobby pins- I still have the photos, although I remember throwing a good many of them away! Then there was my god-awful experience at Oscar Oscar, in Indooroopilly, before we finally found a great hairdresser. The hairdresser Gam took me to gave my hair a proper blow-dry to make my hair straight and the result was incredible. So much for the 'no touching' rule- it was like having a head of hair that didn't belong to me, and I simply couldn't leave it alone. I went back to the hairdresser a few more times and was happy with the result each time.

The price? When I was no longer working and had switched to the el-cheapo but largely very capable uni hair salon I calculated how much I had been paying per day for hair I was happy with (for a day or 2 until I had to wash my hair and it returned to its unruly ways for another 8 weeks). It was something in the vicinity of $3 per day, not including things like the expensive shampoo, sprays and serums I'd been buying at their recommendation. At the time I bemoaned spending that amount of money for no lasting effect when I could have put it into our savings account. Later, when we went to Ghana I realised that what I had been spending on a visit to the hairdresser was what some people there supported their family on for a couple of months. What lasting benefit had my expenditure had? Absolutely none.

Nowdays I only buy shampoo & conditioner from the supermarket on special (I do have to be picky about brands because some make my head itch) and I still get my hair trimmed at the uni hairdresser. My hair doesn't really look any better or worse than it used to apart from being slightly less dry as a result of not dying it any more. I haven't stopped caring about how I look, but I have stopped agonising over my hair's failure to behave. Although I'm quite sure that if I start to go grey in my mid-late 30s like my Mum did I'm going to do the vain thing and start dying my hair again (Mum refused).

"I sell ze haircare to ze vimmen. Me? To wash ze hair take about 2 minutes."

For the haircare product industry there's great value in the changing fashion for hairstyles. The switch from flat-ironed hair to bouffant tresses renders a woman's accumulated collection of hair care products obsolete. The solution? Buy all the new ones! First it's the products that claim to make your hair look or behave a certain way, then they'll flog you products designed to undo the damage done by the styling tools or products used to create that hairstyle. Then you throw them all out to make way for the products you'll need in order to turn yourself into a clone of whatever's new in fashion at that point in time.

I may be non-fashionable now, but not as far out of fashion as bi-coloured quasi-mullets (and probably the big blow-dry) will be by the time Gam and I have kids. When I see a bunch of identically dressed and coiffed fashion victims I can't help thinking that their children will laugh at them in the same way that they laughed at their parents for what they wore during the 70s. At least their parents had the excuse of being stoned at the time... and probably didn't spend as much on their hair as they did on food and rent.



I wonder how many of today's victims of fashion will be like my grandmother at 90 years of age, running around trying to brush great decade-lengths of grey and refusing the offer of scissors with the protest that "A woman's beauty is in her hair"...