Does Your Hair Have History?
By: Lynn Zimmering
Tags: Hair, Pain, Self, Embarrassing, Jealousy

To men and women alike, hair matters.

Here’s what we do to hair: wash, condition, style, brush, dye, shave, remove by laser, or electrolysis, or wax, pluck, tweeze, and thread. There are so many ways to style it, too many to name, but here are a few:

Guys sometimes have Mohawks, flat-tops, bowl cuts, comb-overs, or go bald, and girls have braids, updo, or the famous pompadour worn by both men and women. We wear wigs and toupees—all in the service of looking good or other valid reasons.

Hair must have something special about it. So I researched and find it is a symbol of power, fertility, identity, and pride in how we look. It has religious and cultural significance. We develop group identification through our hairstyle and conform to religious teachings by covering it.

Check out Wikipedia on “Hair” or the article, Ashby, S.P. (ed) 2016 Archaeologies of Hair: the head and grooming in ancient and contemporary societies, Internet Archaeology 42. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.42.6. There is a vast amount of literature on the subject of hair.

So, it’s not just hair. It’s MY hair.

My mother takes me to have my first hair cut at Best’s and Co. department store when I’m two. I throw up (or so I am told) as soon as I feel the cold bladed scissor on my neck. I must be so terrified. (That is the last haircut attempt until I am thirteen years old. )

Shirley Temple, the child movie star, is a style-setter in my early years, and we both have curly hair. That’s about where our likeness ends.

The new Shirley Temple style for little girls is to have big fat curls instead of the cork-screw type. For me, that means standing very still every Saturday morning while my mother impatiently brushes my curls around her fingers, pulling my hair unmercifully to make the appropriate style. This fussing is in preparation for having lunch with my father and his male friends. We do that about once a month. Mom is maybe jealous since she is not invited to these outings. So, she lays into me by yanking my hair around. I need these curls, however, to resemble Shirley Temple.

We frequently have lobsters at these lunches! I love lobster, so I ignore the preparation discomfort. I’m about four to five years old and too little to object. I learn to accept whatever comes my way.

Other than Saturdays and holidays, my hair is in braids. That hurts, too, from the tightness of the twist.

Something has to be done about my growing hair where it doesn’t belong — on my face. I have a unibrow and a shadow of a mustache. As a preteen, this hair affliction is a horror for my mother, and I am embarrassed, too.

Mom finds me an electrologist downtown, who rescues me and my face from the unwanted hair. It is an acceptable treatment for the removal of unwanted hair. Each week, I take the subway downtown to her studio, alone, for a treatment. The treatments are agonizing.

Hair mustn’t be in the wrong place. It has to go.

A needle is poked into the root of each offending hair follicle (this hurts) to which an electric charge is administered (this hurts even more), killing that particular hair. This is done one hair at a time. By the time the treatment is over, the area worked on, my brow and my upper lip, are bright red and hot.

The electrologist then puts calamine lotion ( it’s pure white) on my face, and I walk through the streets and take the subway to get home. My face looks ghoulish. I am scrutinized by every single person who sees me. They stare, and I pray to vanish. Then, next week, I do it all over again. I am thirteen years old. The treatments work, however. The unwanted hair slowly disappears.

By my high school years, I take care of my hair myself. Thursday night is hair night. In these years, we only wash our hair once a week, so Thursday is it. I shave my legs and my armpits, too. Since I still have a mustache’s vague shadow, I bleach the shadow, all on Thursday night. It feels like a necessity.

After college, I meet a guy who I think is divine. One night, at a gathering during which we all have a lot of wine (I have scotch), he kisses me. That is also divine. Then he says, “I could really go for you, but you have too much hair on your arms.” What? Once again, hair causes me pain, this time not physical but adding to my already impaired self-image. I end up feeling guilty and powerless over this disfigurement.

Since I’m so hairy all over, my head hair is really thick, dark, and curly. It’s the only hairy attribute I like. However, by the time I’m in my late thirties, I see the first uninvited gray strands appearing. I always felt redheads had power. (This is based on Maureen O’Sullivan’s role in some movie.) I dye my hair reddish to cover the gray and to give me a sense of artificial strength.

It looks good, so I keep the color for years, and I feel more “in charge.”

Then, I become a Type 1 Diabetic, and ironically, my hair begins to disappear, all on its own, not only on my head but every other place on my body. After so many years of fretting about my hair, too much of it in the wrong places, too much work to take care of it, causing lots of pain to remove it, and messing up my love life, it’s leaving my body: goodbye and good riddance.

Soon, I see smooth arms, legs, and armpits. I don’t have to shave anything or continue dying my hair. I let it go totally gray. My hair issues have made a complete turnaround in my life, going from being painful and embarrassing to nothing at all. Finally, my hair issues are gone.

Except, of course, I still spend a bunch of money on what’s left of it, to have it cut and styled.

It’s my hair, after all, and how I look.