Hair
Gimme a head fulla hair... long beautiful hair!
I never imagined hair would mean much to me until I didn’t have very much anymore. During menopause, I lost it by the handfuls and once that completed, which took around 10 years (seriously), it started to grow back a bit.
Many people know that COVID-19 was the scourge of hair loss in both older and younger people. Poor Eric had rock star hair for most of his adult life. He left the military in 2000 and did not cut his hair again until nine years later when he applied to be a highway patrol cop. Thankfully, he did not get the job, but he did sacrifice his coiffeur to not get it.
As an aside, when we moved the house where that last photo was taken, that fireplace was the same white as the walls. Someone actually painted the bricks so that it basically disappeared into the wall. So, guess what? Someone else (me) painted the bricks back to brick color again. Every. Single One. I can tell you that there are 609 flat surfaces in that fireplace, hearth, and mantle and each one required around 9 coats of paint. The “mortar” between the bricks is the white paint that was on the bricks rather than actual mortar.
Funny story. A day or two after he got his haircut in 2009, we had a function at the school and people kept giving me the stink eye worse than they usually did. I wasn’t sure what was wrong, then Eric got up to give a speech on behalf of the non-profit we were a part of that benefitted the school and as he was introduced and began to speak, there was a collective sigh and some nervous laughter. People there actually thought I had showed up with someone else.
COVID did this man so wrong. In addition to a handful of days of feeling rough and having some muscle aches, he lost a good bit of his hair and what he does have never grows at all.
He still has a shorter and thinner ponytail down the back, but it is not nearly what it used to be, much to his dismay. He tried all the treatments short of hair plugs and still did not get the results he wanted. His twin brother lost most of his hair many years ago, so Eric was lucky in that respect. I like it, but it doesn’t look the way he wants it to. Don’t mention his hair to him except to tell him how awesome it is.
I lost lots of hair with COVID as well, but not as much as I expected.
For most of my adult life, I colored my hair. I started doing it for my own entertainment purposes, but eventually, it was to cover grey. The hair stylist who did my hair for years encouraged me not to go natural. I always had a few inches of grey when I would touch up my hair and always thought about going natural, but Sue would insist it would wash me out and make me look like I existed in greyscale given my complexion.
In 2017, a friend of mine who occasionally cut and styled my hair for me, did me the biggest favor of my life. She mapped out my pattern of greying and used highlights and lowlights and all kinds of lights and made all of my hair look like what was growing in.
That let my hair grow out without any transition time and I just never looked back. It was nice not to play constant keep up with the dye jobs and I enjoyed the salt and pepper look, although it is more salt now than pepper.
That same friend changed my life again when I told her that I wished perms hadn’t gone out of style and didn’t wind up my hair into such tight curls. I only wanted some good wave. She said, “Oh, do you mean like this?” and cut my hair into layers and scrunched it up with some product and suddenly, I had wavy hair. It was magic, let me tell you. You can see the wavy difference between the 2016 and 2017 photos above.
Looking at these older photos shows me how much I have aged in the past eight years. Granted, it was a challenging 8 years, but whoa doggies! That does sneak up fast.
My face is too round to tolerate a short haircut without looking like the full moon is rising on top of my neck. When I go get my hair cut now, they do it in the same style no matter what I ask them for, then look constipated if I suggest anything else.
This was right after my last surgery in 2022. That was a pretty rough year. I told Eric if he just went for it and shaved his head, he would look strikingly like General Zod from the first Superman movie.
He could pull it off with the hair he has now except that the ponytail blows apart the entire look. He doesn’t want to shave it yet because of the ongoing maintenance and I can certainly high five over that. He also wants to milk all he can out of what hair he has and at least is not working a comb-over, so I’m just counting my blessings here.
This is me now, no makeup to speak of because remember from last week’s post, it immediately slides right off my face. I see some blue eyeliner still on the skid about to leave the bottom of my right eye. My hair color and thickness has been about the same for two years or so now.
When you’re older, it is hard to find products that help your hair not be so brittle and wiry. Grey hair is just different from not grey hair. Biotin and keratin are both good, but they take a long time to hit their load time and work, plus you need to take it pretty regularly for it to work.
This shampoo and conditioner set is quite good:
…but it is a heavy conditioner and builds up quickly, so I have to trade it off with a good clarifying shampoo to get off the excess conditioner that hangs around. I use this one:
I have used expensive shampoos and conditioners and I have not found any to be especially better than the lower cost options.
When I was growing up, all of the Ladies Of A Particular Age used Fanci-full.
This was a rinse for people with light colored hair and its purpose was to tone down the brassiness that older hair sometimes gets to the color. My late former mother-in-law bleached out her hair so often that when she decided to let it grow out from the white blond she always peroxided it down to, it just kept on going. She missed the whole transition time entirely.
Then we had the church ladies who must have all gone to the same beauty shop or something because their hair was always done with the same degree of tint to it. Now, of course, pink or green or purple hair is the norm no matter what age you are, but in the 1960s, only the elders had blue or lavender hair and it was always this very delicate, light pastel color, sort of like an Easter egg:
Unfortunately, this stupid wig ad is the best example I can find of what it looked like. The style was always curled and teased to be quite poofy. Back then, the idea was “the higher the hair, the closer to Heaven.”
I always thought it was just divine but now that I am Of An Age (likely now younger than most of them were), I find I prefer my natural hair color best.
For now, I’m just thrilled to have any hair at all. I don’t use much product on it, hoping that gives it a bit more time on my head instead of on my shower drain. I rarely blow-dry it. I try to cut it every two months or so to keep the split ends at bay.
My grandmother - this is completely serious here - never cut her hair in her entire life. She was a Pilgrim Holiness minister and was raised in that faith, so her hair went down to the backs of her calves. I only saw it loose once when I walked in on her taking it down from the pin up she wore every single day of her life.
Other than that one time when I was maybe six years old, I never saw her when her hair was not rolled into a sausage-shaped roll and pinned into a U shape from ear to hear and around the base of her skull. She died at age 86 and I’m betting that hair was all pinned up in that roll.
I don’t know a damned thing I did every day of my life other than the biological necessities. That took some real commitment. What I do know is that for the past three years, every day I have been filled with gratitude when I wake up and realize that I get to be here for another day. I don’t look forward to the time when that changes, but for now, I will just focus on making the most of this day I got today.
PS: In case you aren’t a musical theater/movie nut, here is the clip for the song that the subtitle of this post comes from:
And here is the movie promo for this film that came out in 1969:
Yes… that is a VERY young Beverly D’Angelo and John Savage and Treat Williams and The Fifth Dimension.