Thinking about my hair

I saw a photo of an author I admire recently, and she had no hair. I worried she was ill, so I immediately investigated. She was not ill. She had cut off all her hair and had done it for good reasons, she said. She had done a lot of thinking about her hair – a lot more than I had.

First of all, she said, she was not blond. “No one is blond,” she added, or almost no one.

Less than 1% of the population is blond, and she implied she felt dishonest pretending she was blond when she wasn’t. She went on to say that she had spent thousands of dollars and untold time on her hair. She sounded a little angry about the whole thing – the money spent, the dishonesty of it all.

I admit, I felt a little defensive because I am not blond either. I have never been blond. But I had never considered that I was part of some massive blond conspiracy, posing as blond to dupe the unsuspecting. I just assumed that everyone knew I was not blond. So for the record: I am not blond.

I am just not good at growing hair. I used to feel the need to apologize to my hairstylists. “I’m good at doing some things,” I would insist. “Growing hair just isn’t one of them!”

The hairstylist would work away for long minutes, and at the end, I would get up from the chair and there was no hair to see on the floor. It was as if the entire thing had been a pantomime involving scissors.

So now, my husband, Peter, cuts my hair. He finishes in less than five minutes and, given how little he has to work with, does a very fine job.

And, once every four months, I buy a box of hair dye and bleach my hair screaming blond. (I’m not sure if that’s what the color is actually called, but it should be.) I figure, maybe if I’m blond, people won’t notice that I don’t have a lot of hair and that, what little there is, sticks up in odd directions.

But now I wonder how I’d feel if I cut off all my hair.

Peter would not like it, I know. When I still had other people cut my hair, I used to go to a haircutting school, and so I had very little say in how it was cut. Since there were so few options, this did not bother me. But one time, the teacher cut most of it off. Peter was shocked when I came home – which surprised me, since I had so little to start out with. Peter wants me to keep what little hair I have on my head, so for his sake, I do that.

But I don’t think I would want to cut off all my hair anyway.

The feeling I had, reading what this author said, was that being a fake blond was evidence that I was not a very serious person. As I thought about it, I had to agree this was probably true. I am not very serious about my hair, at any rate.

I’m happy with my phony screaming blond hair. My “hairstyling routine” consists of the two seconds I spend every morning checking to see if I have snarls in my hair or if it’s standing on end. After that, I can go for the rest of the day without thinking once about my hair.

And that’s the way I like it.

Till next time,

Carrie