Or "That's me! Always setting trends!" (Which is a literary joke, a reference to That's Me Always Making History.)
The provocation for this week's silly post is a video in a "Dress for My Day" series, in which a nice healthy-looking grandma type tells other women how to dress in order to look "modern." Obvious subtext: today's middle-aged women threw off the chains of "fashion" and the stores really, really want us wasting money the way we were told we had to do when we were young.
The fifth of Kay Harris's five points is absolutely spot-on, and worth watching for if you can stand her style. The key to looking good, at any age, is looking HEALTHY. Even the young tend to betray feelings of tiredness and lose their visual appeal by doing so. Middle-aged people? We tend to look tired because we tend to be tired but, if we do, we'll start hearing people who don't know us guess us to be as old as we really are, which is not something most of us want, especially on a job where two correct or even close guesses can mean involuntary early retirement. The alternative is to get enough rest, miss out on some of the things we want to do right now, turn off those tapes in our heads playing "No Time to Kill" (or actually listen to all of the words of that song?).
But what I really can't get over, even after dissecting the video at (probably tedious) length at a fashion-theme site, is Kay's advice to keep the trendy look of long flowing hair (assuming we can do it, at all, without shaving our heads and wearing wigs) but thin out the long hair.
Modern? Updated? Please. That was the look of my childhood. Dad believed little boys should have short haircuts and little girls should have unshorn lovely locks, even those little girls who, like me, seemed not to be naturally endowed with the ability to grow lovely locks. I had Problem Hair. Dry, brittle, and messy when I was a little girl, it shifted into a new gear and became greasy, brittle, and messy when I was a teenager. The only advice anyone could possibly give about making this kind of hair look good, or at least less bad, was to keep it cut short. Even Mother thought I'd be a better advertisement for her beauty business, while she had one, with a cute, trendy "pixie cut," but that thought sent Dad into Bible-thumping rants.
Not that the Bible actually said that little girls needed to be burdened with the kind of mess I'd been stuck with. What St. Paul wrote to the church at Corinth was "If a woman have long hair, it is a glory unto her." Paul was aware of the possibility that a woman might not have the choice of growing long hair. Dad was aware of the judgmental attitudes of some relatives on his side of the family, whose church had a rule that, if a female of any age could coax half a dozen miserable lonely hairs to grow down to her waist, below a cloud of crackling split ends on her head, then she needed those miserable lonely hairs, uncut, to prove her devotion to the Bible.
My hair could be braided, or tied back, or pinned up, but the limp and lonely strands at the bottom would slither out of whatever had been done to ameliorate their disfiguring effect, and so would the split ends on top. Whatever I did, it seemed, I was doomed to display a crackling, frizzy rat's nest above a tatty rat's tail of, oh be picky if you want to, maybe thirty or forty waist-length hairs.
I didn't want to go against the Bible, and I didn't want to be mistaken for my brother, so I endured the mess on my head. But I hated it.
Anyway, hated or not, it was my look in the 1970s. In the 1980s, like every other girl except the ones who'd done it earlier, I had the mess whacked off and immediately started hearing actual compliments. There exists, in an old yearbook, a photograph showing Little Miss Bad Hair playing the baby sister in a musical, having fun, showing it, and thus bordering on cuteness, but nobody mentioned it until I lost the horrible hair.
This hair, and other things about the way I looked that were definitely not my choice, taught me a very important lesson in life. Namely: We are not all meant to be world-class beauties, and we might as well accept the fact and at least have fun. I thought of myself as at best a very plain teenager. I figured nobody could possibly like me for my looks, so I could forget about looks, wear whatever was handy, and concentrate on being a good listener and loyal friend. This strategy served me well. I cannot recommend it too highly to other teenagers.
The closer of my adoptive brother's distant cousins in Washington were the Muslim ones who wore head scarves everywhere. I thought that might be an improvement and started wearing scarves when I went somewhere with them, as a show of solidarity and a way to cover up my horrid hair, until one of the cousins who felt more confident about her English said "Don't! Don't start dressing like a Muslim unless you become one and give up the choice!" So I didn't; but many were the days when I wished I had inherited the right to wear a head scarf. In some countries, I had read, Christians had kept that...
But then my celiac symptoms worsened, forcing me to face the fact that I was a celiac, around age thirty. And then, after a year or so of going gluten-free, I had the hair I'd always wanted.
I liked the color of my hair, if there'd only been enough of it to do anything but look messy. Also I didn't like the fact that I shed hair continuously, like an indoor cat. Everywhere I'd been, everything I handled, always had a stray end of hair on it somewhere. Brushing and combing didn't help. No matter how many wads of broken ends of hair I picked out of brushes and combs, there was always enough left to shed.
Well, suddenly, in my thirties, there was just the right amount of hair growing out of my head. It looked soft and smooth. It was not thick, glossy, raven-black Cherokee hair, but for Anglo-type hair it wasn't bad at all. It would grow long--well, down over the shoulder blades anyway. It would stand up a half-inch or so above the scalp and look like clean, glossy hair instead of a wad of squick picked out of a sink stopper. It would not, ever, form a single consistent wave in any direction, because different individual hairs would react to different levels of humidity, but on really damp days it could be described as a curly crop rather than a frizzy mess. It was living up to its full potential, at last, after I'd given up hope that it had any potential. In my thirties and forties I liked my hair.
By the time Sarah Palin set the current fashion for long hair, I was giving myself one or two weeks a year to rock something like the "pixie cut" Mother had fancied when I was a little girl, then letting the hair just grow until, at the end of a year, it was flowing down over the shoulders. From time to time I still shed. I learned that humans shed hair when we're under some sort of stress. Criminals usually shed a hair somewhere near the scene of the crime, from the stress of trying to avoid being caught. People who aren't hiding anything from anyone are more likely to shed hairs when having allergy reactions or fighting off infectious diseases--or going down with them. Was there a pattern to my hair-shedding that might uncover additional food sensitivities?
There was, but it didn't uncover specific food sensitivities. It helped identify what my body really was intolerant of: glyphosate.
Skipping over the rest of this web site, we come to the latest development in the story of my legal torture by the Professional Bad Neighbor.: I've shed so much hair that the loss is beginning to show. Once again I look in the mirror, at the end of a summer of unchecked hair-growing, and see the cloud of frizz around my face, split ends making the hair on my head feel coarse and rank if touched, and the thin fringe of limp, sad-looking hairs around the neck. Very similar to Kay Harris's hair in the video, except that my white hair falls out first so the fringe is sable-colored. The halo of split ends is gray.
Modern.
Hah.
And so I suppose it is. At least, I see people who look as if they're trying to grow fashionably long hair and not succeeding. For most of them it's probably a symptom of ill health, as it is for me, but there's Kay Harris telling us she has that professionally done to her hair because the thinner hair around the neck helps lift the eye of the beholder to the top of her head...
Does she really believe that?
Hair cut off right at the hairline helps lift the eye of the beholder to the top of the head.
Hair tied back into braids or ponytails, or pinned up on top of the head, helps lift the eye of the beholder to the top of the head.
Hair straggling dejectedly around the neck, forming little separate wisps and strings, drags my eye down to the neck and makes me think "I wonder what her hair loss is a symptom of."
And I noticed Kay's sags and wrinkles before she even started talking--before I had time to notice how they're emphasized by that thin tatty fringe of long hairs.
But I suppose, the longer we tolerate glyphosate spraying, the more bad hair we'll see, until a critical mass of young women discover how much better they (now) look with short cuts.
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