On: Hair.
I know that most of you have realized that I'm pretty obsessed with my hair.
What many of you may not know is that my mother is a hairdresser.
In other words, my mom has chosen, as her career, her calling in life, to cut and style other people's hair. For this, she is titled Hair Stylist. She has a business devoted to the cutting and shaping of hair. Hair.
There is a hair industry. Literally, they have catalogs full of products for the cutting and shaping of people's HAIR. That stuff that continues to grow all over your body for the duration of your life despite all attempts to stop it.
My mom's scissors cost her over A THOUSAND DOLLARS. SCISSORS. HAIR.
How did this tradition start? Of course, it used to be a simple male luxury to have a barber attend to your grooming needs. And we've all seen the many "services" they offered, from hot towels and haircuts, to shaving and shoe polishing. Now it's difficult to even find an old fashioned barber shop. Most salons cater to women. Why does such stupid decadence continue? I started cutting my own hair almost two years ago. It's not rocket science. My mother is neither qualified to treat cancer nor to run a nuclear reactor. You take some scissors, you pull some hair, you cut. Yet--and please understand that my mother has been FORCED into this position in order to keep a manageable clientele--she charges upwards of fifty dollars to do this herself. Yes, that's just a simple wash and cut. Coloring and perming cost considerably more, in the $70 range (mind you, both of these can be done at home for much less. Are we really so bewildered by the things that happen on the backs of our heads that we can't grab the nearest pair of scissors, grab a chunk of hair, and trust ourselves to cut, at least somewhere in the neighborhood of an inch or so, off? Maybe have a friend or robot do it if you really get nauseous thinking of incurring any sort of damage to parts of your head that you can't see? It blows my mind. Granted, my mom is pretty "good" at what she does, insofar as the hair people have when they come out looks better than it did when they went in. Some of my mom's clients are on a four-week schedule. Most of them are male professionals, and they drop $35 dollars every visit. And for the thirty minutes and thirty dollars spent, you couldn't top-off a film container with the amount of hair removed. Sometimes all they really need is have the back of their necks trimmed. A woman's hair cut (WHC) used to cost 22 dollars. She has had to raise the price of her haircuts on a regular basis to keep people from swamping her schedule, begging for the opportunity to throw their money away. She, like all salons, has an extensive line of retail products to augment the hair-manipulating experience. Do you know what most hair products are? Any combination of glue, fat, glycerin, perfume, dye, alcohol, and water. That's all. You can get all of these ingredients at Safeway. What does a bottle of salon-quality shampoo cost? Over twenty dollars for a 16oz bottle. I started using dish soap last semester, and for me, nothing works better.
It's not that hair isn't important, it really, really is. But as I sat on the toilet, trimming my pubic hairs to a svelte 3mm length, recalling what Ellen had said about my nose hair being too freakishly long for her to even pay attention to what I was saying, it occurred to me that some people spend far more time and money on simple, stupid hair than I do--and some of those people are my mother.
What many of you may not know is that my mother is a hairdresser.
In other words, my mom has chosen, as her career, her calling in life, to cut and style other people's hair. For this, she is titled Hair Stylist. She has a business devoted to the cutting and shaping of hair. Hair.
There is a hair industry. Literally, they have catalogs full of products for the cutting and shaping of people's HAIR. That stuff that continues to grow all over your body for the duration of your life despite all attempts to stop it.
My mom's scissors cost her over A THOUSAND DOLLARS. SCISSORS. HAIR.
How did this tradition start? Of course, it used to be a simple male luxury to have a barber attend to your grooming needs. And we've all seen the many "services" they offered, from hot towels and haircuts, to shaving and shoe polishing. Now it's difficult to even find an old fashioned barber shop. Most salons cater to women. Why does such stupid decadence continue? I started cutting my own hair almost two years ago. It's not rocket science. My mother is neither qualified to treat cancer nor to run a nuclear reactor. You take some scissors, you pull some hair, you cut. Yet--and please understand that my mother has been FORCED into this position in order to keep a manageable clientele--she charges upwards of fifty dollars to do this herself. Yes, that's just a simple wash and cut. Coloring and perming cost considerably more, in the $70 range (mind you, both of these can be done at home for much less. Are we really so bewildered by the things that happen on the backs of our heads that we can't grab the nearest pair of scissors, grab a chunk of hair, and trust ourselves to cut, at least somewhere in the neighborhood of an inch or so, off? Maybe have a friend or robot do it if you really get nauseous thinking of incurring any sort of damage to parts of your head that you can't see? It blows my mind. Granted, my mom is pretty "good" at what she does, insofar as the hair people have when they come out looks better than it did when they went in. Some of my mom's clients are on a four-week schedule. Most of them are male professionals, and they drop $35 dollars every visit. And for the thirty minutes and thirty dollars spent, you couldn't top-off a film container with the amount of hair removed. Sometimes all they really need is have the back of their necks trimmed. A woman's hair cut (WHC) used to cost 22 dollars. She has had to raise the price of her haircuts on a regular basis to keep people from swamping her schedule, begging for the opportunity to throw their money away. She, like all salons, has an extensive line of retail products to augment the hair-manipulating experience. Do you know what most hair products are? Any combination of glue, fat, glycerin, perfume, dye, alcohol, and water. That's all. You can get all of these ingredients at Safeway. What does a bottle of salon-quality shampoo cost? Over twenty dollars for a 16oz bottle. I started using dish soap last semester, and for me, nothing works better.
It's not that hair isn't important, it really, really is. But as I sat on the toilet, trimming my pubic hairs to a svelte 3mm length, recalling what Ellen had said about my nose hair being too freakishly long for her to even pay attention to what I was saying, it occurred to me that some people spend far more time and money on simple, stupid hair than I do--and some of those people are my mother.