“I would never cut my hair.” This is what a co-worker said to me when I commented on her long, curly blond hair. She’s a woman about my age and I just had to ask her: what did she do to take care of her hair? Did she feel, as I do, super attached to the idea of having long hair? What had been her hair care journey? Another friend, also who “still” has long hair, agreed. You have to use the special shampoo, air dry it, go to the salon, use Argan Oil …
Whatever it takes.
In order to understand my hair care journey, you have to go back to when I was a girl. I was eight years old, I had long brown hair and I really didn’t think too much of it. After all, I wanted hair like Barbie. I actually considered it an affront: what was God thinking of? Wasn’t I supposed to have blond hair?
I thought of dyeing my hair but it seemed like so much trouble. And the truth is, in those days dyeing your hair was thought tacky. First, you dye your hair, or wear big hoop earrings, next thing, you’re living in a trailer park. We were respectable girls. I would just have to adjust to the fact that I had second class hair.
And then … a couple of critical times … I heard that men actually, sometimes, liked dark hair! OMG. It had never occurred to me.
As MetroMan says in MegaMind: “There’s a yin for every yang … ”
Apparently, I could still get the interest I wanted from men with my dark hair.
Nevertheless, after I met Leo, I said I was dyeing my hair blond, a year after we’d met, and he said “I absolutely forbid it. In the last few years, I was dating a red head and a blond, and I’ve finally got a girl with dark hair, and you are not dying your hair blond.” Put aside the arrogance of my ex husband (who apparently thought my hair belonged to him,; later, I realized that it wasn’t just my hair it was my entire self) and the wishy-washy people pleasing of my young self who would decide personal appearance questions by the opinion of a man, and you get this: dark hair, Good.
Wow. That was the first stop in my hair care journey.
Dark Hair is Okay?
So I began to think dark hair was okay. Anyway, if I accepted that brown hair could be good, I had good hair. It was long and relatively heavy (one hairdresser said that though I had very find strands of hair, there were a lot of them, thus the overall effect was full) and though it wouldn’t grow *really* long it was long enough.
And then you know what happened. It started going gray.
Just a few strands. And … I plucked them. And then … around age 43, when I was teaching school, blaming the kids in my class for “giving me gray hairs,” I started going to the salon and getting it colored.
This was also about the time friends who used to have long hair began cutting their hair off, citing such problems as “too much trouble” “hair is getting too thin,” and “it just feels good short.”
Oh my God! Not me! I wasn’t cutting my hair for anything.
The hair which as a teenager I thought was so blah had become … sacred.
The gray hairs, once they were colored, were more curly than the others, but I learned that if you used a flat iron, they would go straight. Just as long as you didn’t get your hair wet.
I became super careful with my hair, didn’t wash it too often, only once or twice a week. This was the second stop in my hair care journey. I never blow dried it, or curled it. I noticed that other women of a certain age were doing the same thing. Their hair was still long, and still looked sleek. I could only conclude that the hair care products and techniques available to women above 40 were more sophisticated than when I was a girl. Certainly none of my mother’s friends had been able to wear their hair long at this point.
We were all the beneficiaries of sophisticated hair technology. Boy was I grateful. It seemed too good to be true.
When we came to Colorado, my hair started growing longer. Maybe the cold weather? And I met Emma, my wonderful hairdresser, who became not just my colorist, but my friend, and kept me supplied with the kinds of shampoos and conditioners you use when you’re over 40 and your hair is sacred.
So now, today, I still have long dark hair. It’s a problem that it shows the gray when it grows out. A lot of women have decided to go blond at this point, because when you dye dark hair blond it looks like blond stripes and you can’t see the gray roots very much when they come in. But after all this, I don’t want to go blond. I am a dark haired girl! Even at 50-something. I just told Emily a couple weeks ago that we would have to change our schedule to every four weeks. Because, I have to cover the gray, my hair grows pretty fast and there’s enough gray now that it needs to be covered faster.
The Steps I Now Take to Keep my Hair Long
In order to keep my hair in good condition, I do the following steps.
- I put it up every night.
- I wash it only with the special salon hair care shampoo that Emily sells, and the conditioner.
- I used a deep conditioning “mask” on it once a week.
- I don’t use a blow drier or curling iron.
- I take vitamins — both Vitamin B and a woman’s over 50 multivitamin. And I take collagen.
- A list of recommended hair care products is here.
The result is, I have long hair. It’s strange to me now, that the hair that I thought was so awful, so boring, so blah … has now become … a source of joy. i put it up this morning in what the girls at school showed me, they call it a “pouf” and then I clipped it up from the back, a style that I observed first on one of the moms at the school. I got a compliment! Here’s a picture … I love my hair, and I am so glad, that if I had to start and end at radically different hair attitudes … that I ended up loving it.