Crowning Glory
5 minute read + 6 minute listen
Recently I popped into my usual hairdresser for a quick blow-dry. Once upon a time, my Friday blow dry was a weekend staple. A work colleague had once quipped that straight hair was obviously a Friday thing - ‘A Saturday night thing, actually’, I retorted.
I cannot tell you how good a great blow dry makes me feel. Done properly, it will last me a good four days (it will actually last me eight, reader, but that would seem a bit ick to put out into the public domain, so we’ll officially say four) and invariably makes me feel ever so slightly fabulous. When your hair is ‘done’, you feel ready for whatever life may throw at you - believe me, it’s like some kind of superpower. I go to a very nice local salon where the stylist always does a great job and on this particular day, he did some outstanding work. Hand on heart, I can honestly say this blow dry was phenomenal - a work of hairy art. In fact, while I sat looking at the results in the salon mirror as he did that thing of orbiting a smaller mirror around my head, I barely recognised myself.
And immediately, for the first time ever, I considered chopping all my hair off, embracing the grey and never, ever getting my hair done again.
It wasn’t the process, that most ladies are well accustomed to; my scalp was scrubbed to within an inch of it’s life, my ears roasted from the heat of the dryer and my hairs pulled within a millimetre of actually exiting their own follicles - all pretty standard stuff and never so terrible that I can’t read a magazine or pay attention to a podcast throughout. But on this particular day there was all of this extra faffing about, whereby he started curling my hair with tongs (always makes my hair go frizzy), spritzing me with cough-inducing hairspray (also makes my hair go frizzy) and general swishing of my medium-length hair hither and tither. A blow dry is grand, but all the extra poofing was making my palms sweat as I noted we were almost an hour into the process and I was suffering from a dose of numb-bum. Next thing he was gesturing to his phone camera, to which I hadn’t the heart to say no because he’d poured his actual soul into my ‘do’ and I’m a good, Irish, people-pleasing gal. So he took a few snaps, which may well be taking Facebook by storm as we speak because there was no denying that my hair did look exceedingly good. So good, in fact, that the other three people in the salon turned right around in their chairs to coo and give me admiring head nods. One lady actually got up off her seat, her protective salon gown flowing behind her, her hair wrapped in tin foil, to meaningfully squeeze my arm and mouth the words ‘you look A-Maaazing’ at me in the mirror. It was intense. And rather odd. Instead of making me look and feel a little more glamorous, and accenting my personae, it was as if the hair had become a persona in itself. It felt like I’d been hoovered up and Kardashianised.
Truthfully, the entire experience felt like an assertion of what I’m not, or perhaps what I no longer want to be or look like. And I feel it’s something more and more of my friends and peers are grappling with - that boredom with the enforced salon visits in order to colour and tend to their hair. We are programmed to believe that our hair is our power, our ‘crowning glory’. Remember the absolute agony of Jo cutting her hair in Little Women? It was like someone had died - nay! - been murdered, the thought of short hair on a woman was so obscene. I have soaked up that narrative, the story whereby you need long, beautiful hair on the outside to be beautiful on the inside and I cannot get away from the fact that being pretty is important to me. I can’t bring myself to cut all my hair off because I am vain in a way that cares about what other people might think of me with short hair. Might it speed up my being seen as ‘older’ and why should I care about that anyway?
My hairstyle won’t change my age or my health status and yet I feel that going grey and cutting my hair might mark a point of no return that would bring sadness. Why?
For the first time in my life, on Sunday, I wished I had a blood pressure monitor close to hand so that I could chart exactly how much one single magazine article could manage to vex me to the extent that one did. Exposing my low level for irritation these days it was all about hair. Great hair, to be exact, and how to get said ‘great hair’ at any age. No doubt the article might have offered me some good advice had I not been too cross to read it fully, but I just couldn’t get over the fact that all the advice was being given by a bald man. Experienced, passionate, an expert - certainly. But there was something about his advising women to undertake laborious, time-consuming tasks in order to make their hair look ‘natural’ that really, deeply irked me.
Look, perhaps I need to go and take a good old-fashioned chill pill - or be less sensitive or less self-conscious and go do whatever I like with my hair and stop going on about it. But I do feel cross at a society that entrenches our thoughts so deeply about how we should look, how we should tend to ourselves and how we should listen to a bald man give advice on how our hair should look over what our gut is telling us.
Recently, at home in Cork, some members of my family were gathered around admiring my son’s lovely curls, as you do. I mentioned that since lockdown his father has been cutting his hair and is threatening to cut mine - cue polite, ‘you must be joking’ laughter. After a beat, my mother mentioned how she needed to get back to the salon herself - turns out she’s been cutting her own hair since 2020 and it looks bloody great and absolutely no different to when she was attending a hairdresser.
Give that woman an article for hair tips, I thought. It would be short, sweet and no-nonsense - just like the haircut I’ll get, when I get a bit braver.
Laurie Morrissey, September 2022
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