P.S. Perms Are Back

Perms are back. Reactions to that statement will be very different depending on what age you are but when I think of perms I’m immediately transported back to my teenage bedroom. It was the 90s so naturally, it was grey and pink. Bedrooms were only really grey and pink or grey and lemon in the 90s, not that you could really see the painted anaglypta wallpaper behind the dozens of Smash Hits posters held up with thumbtacks and adoration.

I shared that room with my older sister who had the most magnificent mahogany curls I’d ever seen. It was long and lustrous and cut into a Bon Jovi-esque point midway down her back. She was 17, I was 11 and my hair was a sort of dirty dark blonde, poker-straight except for the frizzy cow’s lick that could not be tamed. In the hopes of achieving my dream curls, I slept in dozens of orange, rigid, plastic curlers for multiple nights before my confirmation but photos of the day are evidence that though the Arch Bishop got to bless a shoulder-high ball of curly frizz, by the time we hit the Goat Grill for chicken and chips it was back to hanging waist length with nary a kink in its curtain-like blandness. That experience is why I very rarely let a hairstylist attempt a curly blowdry and why I’m sure I can feel phantom roller cranial pain even to this day. But still, 12-year-old me ached for a perm or a body wave at least.

Being a teenager in the 90s was brilliant. Well, I think it was. There were no camera phones and no social media so all I have are my hazy memories and often slightly out of focus printed photographs to help me piece together the decade in which I went from a child to an adult.

I thank the universe every day that even Bebo had not yet made its debut. We went to school without a scrap of makeup and untamed hair in bubble toe oxblood doc shoes bought from Peggy at the back of the Ilac Centre.

My first introduction to makeup was when my friend Aislinn bought me some Max Factor foundation for my 14th birthday. I gleefully loaded it on with my fingers until my face looked like I’d applied half a tube of calamine lotion to ease some particularly bad sunburn. My mother was unimpressed by my new makeup skills and brought me to Arnotts for some proper Lancôme foundation that I was warned should be used very sparingly. Without YouTube, my only source of makeup tutorial was a teen magazine bought back from a family holiday to Florida in 1991 so my look was very Nickelodeon with a hint of Disney. For years, way too many years, I wore baby pink eye shadow that in hindsight made me look more like a myxomatosis bunny than the ingenue I was going for. I was also obsessed with blue-black mascara because nothing says sophisticated like navy rimmed eyes.

I’m sure you can pinpoint someone’s age by the way they apply foundation, I have all the brushes and blenders in the world and I still revert back to fingertips.

I completed my beauty routine with a combination of scents so heady that I’m surprised I didn’t pass out. There was always a good spray of Impulse and by good, I mean half a can at least. I’m sure teenage girls in 1993 were responsible for the start of global warming. Then, if there was a disco, birthday party, or chance of coming within ten feet of a boy, we would spray ourselves from head to toe in Dewberry from The Body Shop. I had the perfume, the perfume oil, the bubble bath and body cream. If you were being really fancy you broke out your Exclamation!, probably layered over the Dewberry.

As I got older none of this really changed though fashion became important too. Thanks to a mum who refused to buy me Levis and said that Lee jeans from the Guiney’s denim bar were just as good I found vintage clothes and tiny shops with tops that made me look like I was about to attend Woodstock. While my friends were wearing button sided tracksuit bottoms and Buffalo trainers, I was rocking elephant cord flares I had found in Eager Beaver.

My style peaked in 1996 when I would do my homework, watch TFI Friday and head off to the local nightclub in a satin babydoll dress bought in Cassidys, topped with a cardigan my dad wore for gardening and finished with my school shoes. It was a pretty interesting look, but thanks to the shortness of that dress I never got refused at the door.

Much of the 90s was spent in my room, recording favourite songs onto cassette tapes, making collages out of Smash Hits and Big magazine and writing terrible, terrible love letters to boys that I sincerely hope immediately burned them. I blame Atlantic 252’s heavy rotation of Roxette for my emotional outpourings.

It was a more innocent time. Caught in that weird teen space between girlhood and being a woman we spent hours in Funderland one Christmas before walking into town to try and find East 17 who were gigging in Dublin. We camped out in front of the Conrad Hotel and declared our love for Tony Mortimer. We had no idea if that’s where they were staying, celebrity stalking was way more haphazard before Google, but it was the fanciest hotel we could think of and sure why wouldn’t they be there!

That wasn’t my only 90s brush with celebrity though. In 1995, my friend Sharyn and I heard that a soap star turned pop heartthrob was making an appearance in Buskers in Temple Bar. We weren’t 18 but dressed in my mother’s engagement dress, caked in makeup and with a 20 pence piece in my hand I told the bouncer I had to use the payphone which I knew was down the back. We thought we were so clever but I’m sure the entire crowd was 16- and 17-year old girls that had scammed their way in. We stood as close to the stage as we could and made sure that the pop star knew why we were there. It worked! We chatted, we danced, we kissed! I panicked and legged it. There’s no selfie, no evidence of the only chance I’ll probably ever have of appearing in OK!, but every so often he pops up in something and it makes me laugh. I’ll never tell you who it is, it’s a secret I’ll bring to my grave. Or maybe I’ll DM you. It’s a good one!

Jennifer Stevens, January 2021