Frizz in the land of the frisør

More substantive posts to come, but in the mean time, here's what you're getting:

I know one shouldn't care about things like this. And normally, in my older-end-of-Millenial adulthood, I do not. But my hair looked awful the entire time I was in Norway. Which is, again, a stupid complaint - I was in Norway! In Scandinavia for the first time ever! It was gorgeous! There were fjords and mountain goats! But somehow appreciating the rest didn't stop me from caring about this.

And in fairness, my hair did look unusually terrible. What happened was, not checking bags plus packing light more generally meant that rather than the usual set-up (the right shampoo, conditioner, hair oil, and then, if feeling decadent, hair iron), I was using a "normal"-hair-oriented 2-in-1 that the CVS in town happened to have in travel-size; a very old container of Frizz-Ease, a product that for whatever reason stopped working for me a few years ago; and the occasional hotel blowdryer. Then, on top of that, there was the weather - the daily rain that would stop every so often, but there was always just enough mist that whatever smoothed-out or vaguely ringlet-ish situation I'd achieved (mid-century starlet waves, for the occasional fleeting moment) turned into frizz. And by frizz I don't mean curliness, kinkiness, or any other hair texture one might Embrace. I mean the classically middle-school result of using the wrong hair products for one's hair texture. The last time my hair had looked this terrible was probably when I was 12.

What didn't help matters was that the women of Norway didn't appear to have this problem. Around me, as my hair grew frizzier and frizzier, packs of Norwegians would pass by with long, glossy, hair-commercial hair. Because our society so often defines beauty as Scandinavian-looking-ness, I suppose, the percent of women who resembled supermodels beyond just hair was substantial. Or maybe just felt substantial, because I was so keenly aware that my own hair wasn't having its finest hour, and was selectively not noticing the women who weren't Uma Thurman to my Janeane Garofalo. That said, in Bergen there was this amazing poster I should have taken a picture of, in front of a hair salon, with a photo of the same young blonde model, a Before and an After. The Before showed her with long, straight Marcia Brady hair, and the After with a light-haired version of what my hair was looking like on the slightly-less-misty moments of the trip.

"It just brings light to your face"

Sometimes, when you think it can provoke no further, "Into The Gloss" takes things to a new level. This time, there's a defense of skin-bleaching, from Fanny Bourdette-Donon, a woman who works at Dior:

[...] I used to be so against whitening products. In Africa, all of these women were killing their skin trying to become whiter, and I hated that. But when I had to work on the press kits at Dior for Diorsnow D-NA Reverse White Reveal Night Concentrate, I had to test it to know what I was going to talk about. I became obsessed. Yes, it’s a whitening product but it’s not about being whiter or changing the color of your skin; it just brings light to your face. I’ve never experienced that before in my life. My face literally changed.

Similarly, when I flat-iron my hair, it isn't to straighten it, but to make it more straight.

I mean, the question of why women do the beautification things we do is interesting, and women's candor on the site is what makes "Into The Gloss" so compelling. (Well, that and the dreamworld photos.) There's this rule that says whatever it is you're doing, it can't possibly be to look less whichever-race-or-ethnicity, so those Korean eyelid surgeries? Nothing to do with white people, and aren't white people awfully narcissistic to imagine that it is. In any case, further complicating matters here is of course that the author is selling the product in question, not just using it.

Bourdette-Donon is also frank, if less evasive, about her hair:

When it comes to my hair, my relationship with it has always been bad, because I’m really low-maintenance and my hair is very complicated. My natural hair is really, really curly. I have a lot of volume and so much of it—I basically looked like Tina Turner. I couldn’t deal with it, so I started relaxing my hair at 15—everyone in Africa does it—and it changed my life.

While I find it hard to believe that everyone in the continent of Africa relaxes their hair, the overall point of what she's saying makes sense. It's her relationship with her hair that's "bad," not the hair itself. And the dilemma she points to - being low-maintenance but having hair that's anything but - is one I'd imagine many women can identify with. At least, I sure can. And people with wash-and-go hair will always be asking you (always, that is, at college or in some other close-living-quarters situation) why you make such a fuss, as if you had some perfectly viable wash-and-go option you were to vain to go with... as if a "natural" look that would be even halfway reasonable wouldn't be at least as much work as just straightening what you've got and forgetting about it.

Chop vs. bob, in three acts

I was recently describing my latest haircut to someone over the phone, who referred to the style as a "bob." I was taken aback. Even though yes, I totally went and got a bob - technically went and got another bob, after various others had grown out. But a bob, to me, sounded so outdated. A helmet style. I don't want to look like Louise Brooks!

Shortly thereafter, I saw this "Into The Gloss" post, where Emily Weiss insists that her haircut (an earlier version of which is, sigh, the look I was going for - I have now twice shown this photo to my hairdresser) is a "chop" and not a "bob." It's the it style of the moment, this "chop," although I get to be one of those people who are like, I've been getting (or self-inflicting!) this haircut since forever. Well, on and off since a party in college, at which time Karlie "The Chop" Kloss was probably a fetus with no haircut to speak of.

The difference between a chop and a bob, as I understand it, is that a chop looks like (or is) what one is left with when someone with long hair just chops it off to chin-length or thereabouts. No layers, no hairstyle. This would be a bob. This, a chop. The chop is so-very-now because it's the inevitable response to the previous it-look: ombré. The chop is the haircut you kind of know you'll eventually need, once you bleach the tips of your hair.

The chop, then, is effectively a bob that has not been meticulously styled.

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Which brings us to a challenge: all hair textures can be forced into a bob, but a natural-looking chop, not so much. The chop is thus an incredibly undemocratic hairstyle - a celebration of wash-and-go.

But women of all hair textures are seeking - and getting! - the chop. It just takes some effort to look effortless. Garance Doré could only join in the fun with the help of one of those keratin treatments. "Into The Gloss," meanwhile, in a post with the misleading title, "How to Work the Curl," profiles another woman who went down that same formaldehyde-strewn path.

The two women a) emerge with chic hairstyles, and b) really defend their choice, in a way that suggests curl-flattening is embarrassing, an admission of self-hatred. And this is not only politicized for African-American women but also, apparently, for some who are ethnically Italian-Algerian or Cuban-American. Both women don't merely describe how they got their hair just so, but preemptively address those who would call them traitors. But traitors to what, exactly? Is this spillover of black women's hair politics onto other populations? Is the reason so many non-black women want straight hair related, on some level, to anti-black racism? Just how sinister is all this?

My sense is that (Ashkenazi, American) Jewish women may see going blonde as political, but less so straightening. This may have something to do with how often Jews have naturally straight vs. blond hair... or it may not. (In my own family, straight hair is fairly common, but I'm not aware of any Jewish relatives with hair lighter than light brown. But there are plenty of blond Jews, so.) Or - more likely - it's because when we learn about the Holocaust, the dumbed-down version we get as kids is that Jews were hated for not being blond.

At the same time, some Jewish women are wary of straightening because the flatironed look, esp. with long hair, is considered "JAPpy." And... there are too many levels to analyze there for this blog post not to become a dissertation in its own right. Is the"JAP" with straightened hair more self-hating than the Jewish woman who fears being thought a "JAP" and leaves her hair wavy/curly so as to avoid fitting a Jewish stereotype?

My own hair, if I let it air-dry, with the chop haircut, emerges something like this. Very 1930s. To those (with stick-straight hair) who'd say, 'that's awesome!', let me just point out that it's not a style that even remotely goes with anything I wear, anything anyone these days wears. (Much like how the celebration of curves is supposed to require embracing a late-1950s silhouette.) Because of the particularities of hair texture, I can easily achieve the "chop" styling without exposing hairdressers - or myself for that matter - to toxic chemicals. Which means that as much as I'm thinking, formaldehyde, really?, I'm not really in a position to judge. Also, I have no idea what's in tsubaki oil-meets-hair-iron fumes, nor do I want to know.

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And now, the defending of the indefensible: on women who do not (or do not every day) embrace their natural hair texture. Let me be clear, I also defend women who do so (as in, every day), and understand why it would likely be better if more of us did. So:

1) Often enough, for us women with shall we say textured hair, an attractive straightened look is much easier to achieve than an equally or more attractive one that embraces the essence, but not the often frizzy and inconsistent reality, of a natural hair texture. Lots of women with naturally curly hair who wear their hair curly have actually straightened and then curled their hair. Or they've partially straightened it - done a partial blowdry or partial relaxing. Either way, the curls you're seeing have little to do with the curls that come naturally to the woman in question. Others have undergone complicated rituals involving diffusers and all manner of expensive curly-hair-specific products - products that may not straighten, but definitely smooth. We cannot assume that curly=less effort, or that curly=true to one's natural texture.

2) And when do we even see what "natural" hair texture looks like? The idea that shampooing hair daily is "natural" is - and this should be obvious if you think about it - a construction. As is the idea that this approach is "low-maintenance." There's a fairly consistent societal notion of what constitutes "good" hair, and it requires plenty of artifice for those with fine-and-grease-prone "white" hair, depending how one defines artifice. Daily shampooing isn't (for most routines) some kind of hygiene essential, but merely a way to bring volume and gloss to certain hair textures. If you have a style you can do and then forget about for days on end (which was convenient during Hurricane Sandy, when the hot water went out for a week!), you may well be putting less product and time to the cause.