Showing posts with label hair. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hair. Show all posts

Sunday, 1 March 2020

Tangled hair

Why shouldn't women (or men for that matter) colour their hair any way they want? If they fancy being pink, purple, red, yellow, blue or green, why not? Doesn't it make life more interesting, more fun?

You and I may think that, but for many people apparently it's more bewildering than interesting. An unusual hair colour conjures up all sorts of weird stereotypes about the person concerned.

If they don't instantly suspect you're a druggie, a prostitute or a nutcase, they'll decide you're a wild unreliable party girl, or your boss will say you look too unprofessional for a public-facing role.

There are still plenty of prejudices around hair. Ginger hair can attract snarky remarks. Afro hair styles are frowned on by many employers. Grey hair can make a woman "too old for the job".

Length itself is still an issue. Women are expected to have long hair, men short hair. Even schoolboys have been excluded from school for having over-long hair. I had long hair once in my John Lennon phase, but I've had short hair ever since - a lot more manageable.

And of course there's baldness. Perfectly okay for men (though a lot of men hate being bald and would rather not be). But not okay for women. If you have cancer, then baldness is acceptable. Otherwise it's shocking and ugly and surely you should be wearing a wig.

It's extraordinary that a simple thing like human hair should be subject to such a complicated tangle of prejudice and disapproval and false assumptions. But then the whole human body is subject to just that. Accepting it for what it is seems to be a non-starter.

I guess the only people who can get away with any old hairstyle are celebrities like rock musicians, hospital patients and prisoners. Anyone else had better tread carefully.

PS: A wonderful quote I just came across: "Humans have a big cluster of dead keratin tendrils growing from our heads and we arrange them in different configurations and worry about whether other people find our keratin tendril arrangements aesthetically pleasing."

Thursday, 25 July 2019

Hair talk

Hair. Something that spawns a hundred opinions. Compli-mentary, censorious, shocked, delighted. People are seldom emotionally neutral about a hairstyle, either their own or someone else's.

So let me share some of my own opinions about hair:
  • I've only had three hairstyles in 72 years. As a kid I had a parting, as a twenty something I had a long hair and a beard, and now the parting (and the beard) is long gone.
  • A lot of people with curly hair would prefer straight hair (my own is straight), but I love curly hair. Especially wild Jewish and Afro hair. I'm baffled by the prejudice against natural Afro hair.
  • I'm also baffled by the prejudice against ginger hair. I love it.
  • I love dreadlocks and corn rows.
  • I like dyed hair, but I also like natural grey hair.
  • I love short haired women. And short hair is so much easier to look after.
  • Some people have hairstyles that totally don't suit them. But you can't say so.
  • Hair that droops over someone's eyes is rather ridiculous.
  • I'd hate to be bald. But I don't fancy a wig.
  • Comb-overs are absurd. You'll never catch me with one.
  • Why is the simplest woman's haircut twice the price of a man's?
  • Men's hairstyles are odd right now. Undercut, Caesar cut, buzz cut, Mohawk. Strange mixtures of long hair and short hair.
  • I'm wary of men with buzz cuts. Are they drug dealers or paramilitaries? Or both?
  • I don't have any fancy shampoos. I just buy the cheapest I can find.
  • I tried not washing my hair for a while, as supposedly hair is self-cleaning. I just ended up with stinky hair.
Basically I prefer women's hairstyles to men's. They're more imaginative and they don't look like a prison cut. And they're nicer to fondle. But jeez they're a lot more fuss and bother.