Have you ever had a bad hair day? Well, I’ve been having one since 1984.
For many of us, hair is so attached to our personal identity, we can’t function properly when it goes wrong. I’ve called in sick to work because my hair was looking like a hot mess. And I didn’t even lie about it and Nancy from H.R. was so empathetic, she offered me comp time so I could get a blow out. Hair is important.
It’s normal for teenagers and bored college students to go completely Picasso with their hairdos. When you’re 15, it makes perfect sense to shave the word “kewl” into the side of your head, because why not? You’re 15, you’re supposed to look kind of like a moron. For most women and men, style experimentation with hair is a youthful rite of passage, like acne or liking Christina Aguilera music.
We all go through phases where we grab the dog clippers and try to re-create a look some squinting musician in Rolling Stone is sporting. I’m sure you remember the screams of your own mother when she found you chopping off clumps of your hair the day you realized that you can cut your hair all by yourself.
But somewhere in your mid-30s you have a come-to-Jesus moment with your inner José Eber and realize that no matter how good that girl in Vogue looks with the boxy pageboy haircut, you’re just going to look like a reject from a Ukrainian monastery in that hair. Most sane people find a hairstyle that works and stick to it.
Not me.
For the past 25 years, or as long as I’ve been able to make my own decisions about what to do with the stuff growing out of my head, I’ve managed to do everything imaginable to my hair. And to this day, I continue to slowly abuse my head with delusions of coiffure grandeur.
In 1989 my mother collapsed to her knees, hands clasped, begging me to not get a perm. I had just bought my first Ogilvie home perm kit.
“Becky, your hair,” she said through her tears. “It is not perm hair. You will be sorry for this.”
This marks the 793,123rd time my mother was right about something. I do not have “perm hair.” I have “for the love of all you hold dear, do not try to perm me” hair. For many of you reading this, the words “Ogilvie home perm” conjures up nightmares out of a David Cronenberg film. I get a shudder down my spine just remembering the smell of my hair setting in those rollers. My Ogilvie home perm was like the Hindenburg of hair disasters. I looked like a surprised poodle.
Despite the fact that it’s 2017 and human beings have mastered things like space travel and bioengineering, I still somehow manage to think crimped hair is a good idea. For those who need an explanation, crimping is singeing your hair with a crimp iron until it resembles the shape of a crinkle cut french fry.
In the course of one day in 1993, I turned my hair red, orange, pink, and black. My hair was so emotionally scarred from the ordeal it needed therapy. In the ’90s, we believed that the best thing you could do to your hair was add chunky stripes of bizarrely mismatched color to it.
I’ve tried to copy Jennifer Aniston’s hairstyle so many times by this point I think she could legally sue me. She’s not the only actress whose picture has sent me scrambling to a salon. In 1996, I brought a photo of the actress Isabella Rossellini sporting uber short locks in Vanity Fair to my hair stylist and told that poor women, “This is what I want to look like.”
I don’t know why I thought there would ever be anything someone with the mere mortal powers of a hairdresser could do to make me look like one of the most famously beautiful women in history, but there before the grace of Paul Mitchell go I. Rossellini looked like a frozen Botticelli with her exquisite short do. I looked like someone gave a squirrel’s butt a buzz cut and glued it to my head.
Inevitably, every two years or so I decide I need bangs and make the mistake of doing that to my hair. For about 24 hours, I love them. And the next day, I look in a mirror and scream, “UGH, I DON’T HAVE THE FACE FOR BANGS!” I then spend a year enduring the hell of growing them out and then I see some cute pic of Zooey Deschanel and I think “I would look so cute with that hair” and the cycle starts all over. I am doomed to repeat this hellish loop for the rest of my natural life. I bet even as a ghost I’ll be sitting around saying, “Hmm, but what if I tried shaggy bangs?”
Speaking of bangs, there is a space in hell reserved for history’s absolute worst monsters, like Idi Amin and whoever decided to limit the number of dipping sauces you can get free with Chicken McNuggets. In that horrific space, you spend eternity waiting for your bangs to grow out, in the awkward phase where your bangs are too long to look cute but too short to pull back.
When I turned 40, I gave myself a mohawk. I thought I would look like a chic older version of Kelly Osbourne, a woman throwing off the shackles of middle age and screaming, “I’M LIVING MY BEST LIFE! 40 is the new fabulous!”
I have no idea why I have such grand expectations from my poor hair. My hair is a simple brown sack that wants to be left alone. It wants to retire to a bun on the top of my head and maybe occasionally visit the grandkids in Florida. My hair is a quiet child who likes to read books, and I’m a desperate stage mom who insists on making them try out for America’s Got Talent. One day my hair is going to snap and run off with a bartender from Applebee’s, just to spite me.
Until that day comes I’ll be here, scissors in hand, trying to talk myself out of bangs.
Rebecca Rose cannot braid her own hair. Contact her at rrose@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 6-13, 2017.