Journey To: Hair Daze
(3-minute read)
This week I had a breakthrough and it started with a trip to a wig store.
In the weeks before my birthday, I read an article about how wigs were the hidden secret of every powerful woman's success. It quoted testimonies from Hollywood and Social Media influencers explaining the phenomena.
What a fool I’d been! Most of the lovely women I thought were perfect were dealing with their own “flat hair days” by simply putting on a wig.
“Bad hair” was an issue I’d been dealing with for decades.
On my 67th birthday I thought: why not spoil myself and do some research? Get a small "hair piece" to put over my little ponytail? Little did I know, I was playing with fire. Igniting an old fantasy.
The entire pursuit of perfect hair revolved around something that I couldn't control: a natural curl that should have been on another person's head.
The message was: what comes naturally is not necessarily a good thing. I wasn't yelled at about it. Rather, my hair was a "mother-daughter concern" to rally around, like buying the right bra.
Mind you, this was way before boys. It was something girls did, to please mothers, grandmothers, and, oh-yes, other little girls.
As girlfriends bonded over it, and even enemies agreed about it, we all thought our passion to look good wasn't a bad thing. This desire to look "our best" did, after all, make us feel better emotionally.
It is the age-old longing to belong, a need sunk deep inside of us to honor (and beautify) the family, the club, the tribe.
Sporting a new “permanent wave”, my quest had just begun for the style was out of fashion within a few years (1969)
So the game began. The command to "take a bath and put on a clean tee-shirt” progressed to “wash your hair every day…and add lemon juice for color.”
A hair dryer, with a bag pulled over itchy wire curlers, was the crowning glory of my 13th birthday.
The visit to a hair dresser, who worked out of her living room, was the highlight of my 14th birthday — I finally had a perm!
The Six Week Fix
Washed, Dyed, Conditioned, Blown, Curled, Combed . . . and then come back and do it all over again.
It was all part of contributing to society, I reasoned.
For the next 50 years, I’d declare that my pursuit of physical perfection was part of the human appreciation for art, to be surrounded by beauty.
Only the wisdom of age taught me that I was in a battle I’d never win. People are not flowers and our beauty is beyond shape, color and form. It’s about doing and understanding (consciousness), not sitting in a flower pot in the perfect light.
It hit home when I left the wig shop, with my new “hair hat” in hand. I would meet a true friend — a man, no less — who asked, “why don’t you like yourself?”
That’s when the roller coaster pursuit of physical beauty came to an abrupt crash.
Read the Wig Story: Hair Daze (Recollection No. 104)
