Pretty

Photo Source: Everywhere on Social Media, all credit to the smartass who put it together.

Side Pony. Aqua Net. Toni Home Perm. Sun In. Mall bangs. Red Maybelline Eyeliner (it was black, and you had to use a lighter to apply it to your waterline*). If any of these are familiar…welcome to our clubhouse. We’re always well stocked with Scotch, wine, and herbal tea, so make yourself right at home.

PS: This post is for anyone who ever used “Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific” and was disappointed when no one ever said that to us.

This post comes about after I sent the above photo to my girlfriends. We each indicated which one was closest to our do of the time, and it devolved from there. In case you’re wondering, mine was far right, second from bottom. And to give myself boss status, I grew up mostly in Texas where hair ethos is still “The higher the hair, the closer to god.”

One of the things we don’t talk much about is how much time and money we spent trying to look that good. Or just how badly our choices sometimes turned out. All in the name of being pretty.

My cousin Cara was an early adopter of Sun-In, spraying her hair religiously, waiting for those glorious sun-kissed highlights to emerge. It worked, it just turned her hair orange. “I had orange hair in my 8th grade picture.”

That, however, is not her most disastrous hair story. “The night before our engagement pictures were to be taken my sister insisted on perming my hair. “It will look SO good!” The hairdresser had to chop it short, short, short to get rid of the breakage/frizz. It took a really ruffly blouse to look feminine!”

So many of our choices end up in the pile labeled “It sounded good at the time.”

What’s particularly interesting to me at the moment is how contemporary women, across generations, have given up the hair wars. Almost all of my female students have long, straight hair. They obviously have not set a 5am alarm so that they could get the hot rollers in long enough to create a lasting curl. I say they’re missing an essential life ingredient—daily inhalation of aqua net and a sense of smug hair-styling superiority. Triangle hair did not come easy.

Debbie Sidebar: I just lost an hour of my life trying to google the brand of hair spray we used in my house. Aqua Net was good, but this stuff was shellac in a can. When I say our hair didn’t move, I mean it Did Not Move. Even when standing under the shower after a day spent in south Texas humidity. It’s probably been banned in 75 countries by now because it caused genetic damage, and was no doubt a major contributor to the madness in the south.

I give mad respect to Dolly Parton for admitting that “it costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” If I could reclaim all the money I’ve spent on rollers, curling irons, straighteners, Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific, and styling products I could retire on a cruise ship for the rest of my life. In retrospect, I might have regrets.

In high school, I tried to right by my mother. A farm kid who was undereducated but managed to raise two children to adulthood as a single parent, her dream was for each of us to find security. And in her mind, that meant that my brother should be a truck driver, and me? A cosmetologist, of course. So I signed up for the cosmetology class at my high school.

Let me start by saying that if it doesn’t involve hot rollers, I probably can’t create the style you’re looking for so please don’t ask me to do your hair. The short outcome was that because I opted for college, I was my mother’s deepest disappointment unto her final breath.

But that’s not the best part of my cosmetology adventures. The best part is walking into the Vo-Tech wing on the first day, settling into the classroom, looking around and discovering that I was the only white person in the room. I got good at hair relaxers, but never really mastered the Jheri curl—or any perm, really, because that mess takes more patience and precision than I have ever had. My untextured white girl hair was a thing of great curiosity, and I was willing to be the guinea pig for anything. Here’s what I learned from that experience: White girl hair doesn’t respond so well to bleaching, plus perm, plus relaxer, plus color corrector, especially when each one is an attempt to fix the madness that came before. I finished out that semester with 2” long, peacock blue hair. None of it was intentional, though ironically enough I spent much of that year quoting Missing Persons “I think I’ll dye my hair blue,” so everyone just assumed I wanted it that way.

It could have been so much worse.

*Waterline: contemporary terminology for the inside of your bottom eyelid. Kids these days; who knew?