From glorious tresses to embarrassing messes, bouffants to comb-overs, and rugs to plugs, here's a hilarious look at hair that will leave yours standing on end!With her razor-sharp wit, Mimi Pond offers hair-raising glimpses of barbershop and beauty parlor disasters, presents profiles of hairdressers from heaven and hell, and recaps famous hair moments in film and television. She chronicles the major hair trends of the twentieth century and their impact on history providing insight into how hair has built financial empires and ruined political campaigns. To top it off, she provides tips and snippets of information on such topics as:Hair and religion: The higher the hair, the closer to God Breaking up is hard to do: Good excuses when you change hairdressers Curl up and die: Weaves, cellophaning, green hair, oxidation, and other hair-coloring mysteries Hair as a political statement, or fifty ways to bug your mother The myth of the blonde and where it began

Mimi Pond is the author of The Valley Girls' Guide to Life, Secrets of the Powder Room, Shoes Never Lie, and A Groom of One's Own. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

Contents

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE: Hair Neurosis

CHAPTER TWO: The Trip to Beautiful

CHAPTER THREE: Modern Hair History

CHAPTER FOUR: Bigger-Than-life Hair

CHAPTER FIVE: Men and Hair

CHAPTER SIX: Did You Mousse Me Much?

Epilogue

What is included with this book?

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The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

Introduction

It's right there on top of your head, ready, willing, and able to make a fool of you unless you master it in some way. It's hair, and it's funny. Hair is the biggest symbol of anxiety that we possess. Those who know what to do with it are admired, envied, and usually resented by those who don't. Everyone, hairy or bald, vain or oblivious, has had, at the very least, a passing fear about their hair. Some change their dos at the drop of a hat. Others don't and stick stubbornly with one hairstyle their whole lives through. There is always a lingering worry, in the back of everyone's head, so to speak, that it could be better or, at least, different. After all, when you take off your clothes, your hair is the only thing left on you, a "kick me" sign attached to your flesh.

From CHAPTER ONE:Hair Neurosis

Don't try to deny it. HAIR RULE NUMBER ONE:Your hair is a source of anxiety.It sits right on top of your head where everyone can see it and think to themselves, "Does she comb her hair with a pasta fork?" Or, "Poor dear, I suppose she's just given up." You can spend years and bucketfuls of money trying to find the right look. Then, even when you think you've achieved it, striding confidently from the salon, there's the quietly paranoid sensation that what you see is not what other people see. You can go insane. Oh there are the few among us who have perfect hair, but these are celebrities who have professionals constantly hovering over them. If it's any consolation though, celebrities are even more anxious about their hair than you are, because often their hair is the sum total of who they are.

Is it any wonder we're all so paranoid about our hair?

BANGS! YOU'RE DEAD

Bangs are just the beginning of hair anxiety. Who hasn't suffered the fate of too-short bangs, bangs that make you look shocked, surprised, and well...like someone who's been institutionalized but somehow managed to get ahold of some surgical scissors?

THE HDA

Of Course, our hair anxiety stems from the fact that, in this world, making fun of other people's hair is a recognized spectator sport. Some have a secret code to alert their friends to a hairdo in their immediate vicinity -- an HDA (Hairdo Alert). However, HAIR RULE NUMBER TWO:If you are a true hair spectator, all bad hair will find you.The HDA's in the world will eventually find themselves in an airport while you are stuck there for eight hours without anything to read. It's just that, at an airport with time on your hands, every unisex Billy Ray Cyrus variation imaginable, those rattails on small boys, the old white ladies with Afros, the gals who still have those petrified Farrah wings framing their faces, the men who've managed to sculpt for themselves completely transparent combover pompadours have all gathered here, apparently just to drive you crazy.

At the airport, the mall, on the bus, in the post office line -- this is where you get the impulse to become a hairdresser and just fix everyone's major hair faux pas. But then, to do that, you have to attend a seedy vocational school, also known as beauty college, also known as a beauty institute, with a bunch of scary, chain-smoking, rattailed comb-wielding, eyeliner-masked reform-school graduates, all named Anita Or Tina; practice finger waves on severed mannequin heads; learn about diseases of the scalp; graduate; somehow obtain a license; get a salon job, just so you can stand on your feet all day and put up with a bunch of neurotic whining, complaining crybabies all day long who want to yak about themselves and wonder why you can't make them look like their favorite TV star. Yes, you really have to be a Crusader to want to fix all the bad hair in the world.

HAIR:

The Resonating Touchstone of Memory

Poor, Poor Proust. if only he had known that the stupid little cookie he wrote about was nothing compared to hair. What about the sense memories contained within the aroma of a Toni home perm? The instant recall in a noseful of Alberto V05? The angst of adolescence that comes rushing back in a veil of Aqua Net?

Mom designated one sister the long-haired one and one as the short-haired one, and annoyingly, thirty years later, it's still stuck.
Watching Cousin Jetta roll her hair on orange juice cans and worshiping her as a goddess, she vowed to have the biggest hair on the planet.
Driving across Texas on long car trips, he and his sister would sit in the back seat and take turns sticking things in the back of Mama's giant hairdo to pass the time.
Sitting in a high chair in the kitchen with a pillowcase fastened around his neck with an old diaper pin, Daddy tried to tell his son the facts of life while razoring the back of his neck. "Son," he recalls hearing Dad say, "you know, you can't put your penis in a woman's flagellum if it's all floppy."

MY FIRST BAD-HAIR DAY

Everyone has had a bad-hair day, but the worst ones happen to children. They can't communicate what it is they want, or if they can, the idea is generally vetoed by grown-ups. Is it any wonder that these memories stay with us our whole lives?

Lousy Timing

Marjorie recalls getting lice at age ten and undergoing the usual nasty medicated shampoo and fine-toothed comb procedure.

Weeks later, the treatment successful, she went for a sleepover at a friend's house. When Marjorie colorfully related the story of nobly and bravely enduring this harsh treatment to her friend and her friend's mother (pointing out the fact that she didn't even cry), she thought she was casting herself as the heroic, stalwart survivor of a horrible fate. She was then surprised to find herself quickly packed up and driven home in her pajamas.

The Curtain-O-Hair

Al Hoff recalls a San Francisco childhood of pathetic hair and miserable yearning. She would stand in the beaded curtain doorway of her closet, pretend she was Cher, and practice the patented one-finger, two-finger Cher hair flick. She also says she would gaze at the long-hair wigs in the cheap hooker wig store at Powell and Market. Says Al, "I longed to have the strength to wear one. Imagine that Jan Brady had more guts than me!"

Not Sally Bowles

Ann relates that when she was in the fifth grade, after the movie Cabaret came out, her mother, apparently inspired by the prewar decadence of Berlin, told the beautician to give her daughter a "Liza" cut. Ann did not resemble Miss Minnelli. The asymmetrical spit curls plastered to her cheeks only served to emphasize her glasses and braces. There was much weeping.

Minute Maid

Marcy R. reports that when she was fifteen and living in Miami, she performed a particular classic teenage ritual in order to make her unruly, frizzy hair up-to-the-moment, long, perfectly straight, parted-down-the-middle Marsha Brady hair. The ritual involved rolling the hair on top of her head on two large-size Minute Maid orange juice cans and then taking the hair from the sides of her head and wrapping it completely around her head, plastering that with Dippity-Do and pinning it down with long clips (but not too many, because she didn't want dents). One afternoon, she had performed this elaborate toilette and was in the kitchen getting some juice when her older brother and his friends, upon whom she had crushes, walked in. They teased her mercilessly, flicking at the cans atop her head, completely humiliated her, and drove her to tears. Ironically, a few years later, after she allowed her hair to go wild and natural, her brother's same friends began to ask her out. Did she date them? No.

OUR WORST HAIR EXPERIENCES:

Walking Nightmares

Town Without Pity

Helene reports that, soon after she moved to Los Angeles from New Jersey, she was referred to a hairdresser in a posh West Hollywood salon. The hairdresser kept her waiting for an hour, then dragged her outside to the barren, asphalt parking lot, where, under a pitiless California sun, he disgustedly examined her locks. He told her that he couldn't touch her hair unless she allowed him to color it first. She told him she didn't want to color her hair. He accused her of wasting both their time and turned on his heel. Helene felt humiliated and angry. She didn't know what his problem was, but later she was pleased to learn that he had to go to the Betty Ford clinic for it.

Just Two Words

I never expected my bad-hair day to fall on an afternoon when I, in desperate need of color and a trim, was instead preoccupied with chasing a two-year-old around an art museum. When I picked her up, her screams of defiance filled the gallery, and as I looked around for my husband to tell him I was taking her outside, I drew a withering glance from an older, perfectly groomed, perfectly dressed, obviously childless woman. "She's two," I threw over my shoulder defensively as I walked by. "Well," the woman said, "she ought to be outside." "I'm just looking for my husband -- " I began, wondering why I even needed to give her any explanation. He came by and wordlessly took my daughter out, leaving our four-year-old son with me. "Children don't belong in museums," she pronounced airily, gesturing toward my son, who was absorbed in a painting, "I feel sorry for your son. He obviously doesn't want to be here." I was sputtering with anger. "You have no idea -- " I began. "Why didn't you just get a baby-sitter?" she asked. "You don't know what you're talking about," I said through clenched teeth. She gave me a pitying look, up and down, and then she said, condescendingly, "Oh...why don't you just go get your hair done?" It was then that I found myself screaming, in the middle of a crowded art museum, "FUCK YOU!"

Excerpted from Splitting Hairs: The Bald Truth about Bad Hair Days by Mimi Pond
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.