Maxigumee

I was reading a profile of Nora Ephron in The New Yorker the other day and I stumbled across a quote that pretty much sums up the feelings I have about my hair. Ephron is quoted as having said, “The amount of maintenence involving hair is genuinely overwhelming. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.” I feel like this woman knows me.

My hair is seriously the bane of my existence. In terms of genetics, I was not blessed with the lovely wavy locks that so many people take for granted. My hair is completely, horribly, 100% straight. People have constantly reminded me of how lucky I am to be born with naturally straight hair, noting how much time it takes for them to flat-iron their hair. Why, I wonder, would anybody want to do such a thing?

My hair isn’t just straight. It’s dry and flat and limp and dull on top of being straight. Imagine a porcupine with straw on its back instead of bristles. When my hair has no product in it, each strand stands entirely on its own, pointing directly outward, like on somebody who has just been struck by lightning. This makes my hair incredibly high maintenance not only because I have to spend about an hour grooming it, but also because of the number of products I have to apply to it (three).

The sad and, unfortunately, permanent state of my hair also makes it nearly impossible to cut properly. Whenever I go to a salon, the stylist thinks they know what they’re getting into, but they really have no idea what kind of monstrous creature lives on the top of my head. After I leave a hair salon, nine times out of ten I look as if somebody let Helen Keller go at it on my head with a pair of rusty scissors. Because my hair is about as lifeless as a rotting corpse, all of the fancy layers that the stylist put in it to thin it out and boost its texture end up looking like terraces on a seriously demented mountain. Most layers, when implemented correctly, should blend in with the rest of the hairs and subtly add life and body to a hairstyle. With me, because my godforsaken hair has a life of its own, my layers like to announce themselves to the world and set up their own independent governments.

I went to a hair salon for the first time in over a year about two weeks ago. This is because I’ve come to the conclusion that I know my hair best, so I should be the one that cuts it. That works out pretty well for most of the time, but after a while, it just gets too raggedy and frumpy and I have no other option but to take it to a professional. On this particular trip to the salon, the hair stylist thinned out my bangs a tad bit too much. Sitting on the chair, post-operation, it looked fine. But my hair never stays the same way for long. Because the newly thinned out bangs were no match for the naturally-occurring hair grease that we all produce, their completely normal appearance slowly degraded throughout the day until it looked like my head had been doused in water. Now, until my bangs grow out some more, I’ve had to add one more product to the ever-growing list of hair products that my toiletries bag holds: baby powder. The stylist can not be blamed for any of this, though. It really is my awful, awful hair.

I’ve considered that it might actually be because I generally go to salons and not barbers. Barbers are much more used to cutting men’s hair and I’m sure that they have a wide range of hair-types that walk through their doors. The only reason that I’ve stuck with salons instead of barbers is that I’m afraid that my incessant nitpicking and very specific styling requests might seem a little, well, gay.

Imagine me going into a barbershop filled with greying old men, overgrown houseplants, and an old Italian barber smoking a cigar. Little old me sits down in the chair in front of the mildew-stained mirror and launches into an epic-length soliloquy about how I want my hair to be cut.

“Ummm,” I’d start off meekly, “okay, so I want it cut a bit shorter all over but not too, too short. Only a little bit shorter. And I want the top left kind of long. But not too long. Maybe just a tad bit shorter. Like that much. Okay. And then I want the sides brought in a little more, thinned out a little bit. But don’t make it too short or else my ears will stick out. Maybe just half an inch. Alright. And then the back….. make the back shorter, kind of tapered in at the bottom maybe. And leave the bangs long. And don’t cut them all emo and Zach Efron-y. Just kind of classic and simple.”

It’s usually this whole “classic and simple” thing that tends to throw hair stylists off. They just don’t seem to get it. When I say classic and simple, I mean something like a 1950s schoolboy or John Lennon before they Beatles got all trippy. When I gave my hairstyle spiel to the stylist I just went to, she had me turn around and look at a row of photographs. “Kind of like that?” she asked, pointing to an image of a man with asymmetrical bangs so intense that they put Pete Wentz’s to shame. “Erm…” I said. “Not quite.”

So, there you have it. One part of the Never-Ending Saga of Maxwell’s Hair. If anybody has suggestions or tips for working with unmanageable hair on the straight side of the spectrum, they would be greatly appreciated. I have a feeling that I am doing this all wrong.