filed in Fashion Forward
Hair Don’t
More than 10 years ago, the trusted woman who cuts my hair urged me to try a new style. I was up for a change, so I boldly took her suggestion. My hair looked great when I left the salon, but in order to maintain this chic new cut, I had to use a blow dryer (which first meant buying one). I’m not skilled with tools, and it took me 20 minutes and a neck cramp each morning to walk out the door in style. These days, I have no idea where my blower dryer is.
Illustration by Elzbieta Gaudasinska
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Online Tryouts… that’s what I call coffee dates… she’s trying out me, I’m trying out her… sort of like shoes
And it’s feast or famine.
After a year of discouraging encounters of being rejected or not finding interest, all of a sudden I switched dating sites.
Three women hit me immediately. All meet minimum standards for followup: tall, not fat, well-educated, signs of sass, .
Now I face the worst possible scenario, the unimaginable, the impossible… all three are sticky.
My expectations were that at least two would find me uninteresting, if not all three.
I’m now past three encounters with each and feel I have to drop two from consideration. Continuing is not fair or honest to them since I want only one woman in my life. I also can’t bear the schizophrenia of managing who said what.
No, I haven’t told them. How could I? What could I say? After all, it’s only dating. It’s tryouts, not commitment.
Why do I feel so bad about this?
Dating is not mating. As long as you don’t misrepresent yourself, give it time and keep exploring. You’ll sort it out soon enough.
I understand what you mean. I tried a different hair cut when I was about 14 years old. It was the worst thing that I ever did. Not only did the new hair cut give me bangs, I too had to learn how to do something with the new mess. I had forgotten about the thing until you brought back the memory. I am glad that someone is sharing this information with the young people coming up in the world.
I used to be so vain about my hair, sleeping in hot rollers (was I insane? I was a teenager though), obsessed with getting the perfect perm that always looked great when the stylist blew it dry, but once I washed it, it was a frizzy mess. After high school I said screw that and just wore it straight, no perms, no curling irons, no curlers, air dry. Now I just have to work up the nerve to ditch the dye and go gray!
It was the highlights on top of the perm that sent my hair into frizz land. I looked like Bozo the clown.
When I was young, my hair was always stick-straight, and I envied the girls who had some curl. Of course, I shelled out a lot of money over the years for perms. Now that I’m older and my hair has started to curl on its own, I have no idea how to handle it – it was so much simplier when it was always straight.
As for color, I used to experiment a lot, and found that I must have looked really great as a blonde, because I received a lot more male attention and got asked out much, much more often, :-). But, as luck would have it, the chemicals to go blonde were also very destructive to my hair, and just touching it would literally make it disintegrate.
**sigh** The hair gods are not kind.
I have fairly fine hair, but a fair bit of it. I had always been vain about it – perms in high school/uni; shoulder-length until 2 yrs ago. It would go flat so easily – not good for someone who wears hats/helmets often. I’ve embraced a short style, it suits me better. Just last night I ditched a bag of velcro rollers and big round brush that had been in the back of my closet for 5 years. It was liberating!
Next step is to learn how to trim on my own so I can extend the length of time between visits to the hairdresser.
My current hair stylist gives a free “freshen” in between haircuts to clean things up a bit. It’s great.
Wow – I had forgotten about the hair – I could write a whole story about this. Mine turned curly in pre-adolescence. Suddenly I had huge, frizzy hair. My mother was horrified. (How could I do this to her?!) Nothing worked to tame it. I was so ashamed; it felt like a personal failing. All through high school I painstakingly blow-dried one small section at a time, trying to keep it flat – but if there was any humidity at all it looked like a lion’s main by the end of the day. It wasn’t until college that allowed my hair to be itself and embrace its curly destiny. My long curls became an asset for the first time. I still admire a picture I have of me in college – dragging on a cigarette – my endless curly locks falling from my tilted head. Now it is not so curly and when I show people my driver’s license picture they can’t believe those ringlets were natural.
It took me until about 25 to really learn how to work with my hair. Now that I’ve got the right products and equipment, I can make numerous styles work (I’m naturally curly but now own the BEST FLAT IRON EVER and can go straight in about 15-20 minutes). I think I’ll always be vain about my hair, but I’ve learned how to be vain quickly (a lengthy dying project every 3 months, a quick touch-up at 6 weeks after the last dye, and either 10 minutes of blow-drying after a shower or letting it air dry and a 15 minute straighten.
What I dread is getting to the point where I look “too old” to have really long hair. The longer my hair is, the more manageable it is, and I LOVE the fact that it’s a little over 2′ long right now.
Protip for anyone with curly, frizzy hair: FRIZZ-EZE is the schizz. And corny as it is, the Maxiglide infomercial flat iron is solid gold.
Oh dear, the timing! The memories! I recently came across photos from a 2003 family reunion. We had a deep drought in 2002 and I’d chopped my hair off from mid-back up to a pixie cut (something I should never wear) in order to keep my showers under 5 minutes. No amount of mousse or spray could help that ‘do. And, of course I’d just gotten it trimmed up for the reunion, so I’m now digitally immortalized in my Worst. Cut. Ever.