Me, My Hair, and I (5 page)

Frizzball

PATRICIA VOLK

I
have thousands of enemies. That's not in my head. It's
on
my head. I'm talking follicles. The average person has 130,000. Follicles can be friendly or you can spend your entire life as I have, duking it out with them every single humidiphobic day.

This was not always the case. I was born with “naturally curly hair.” It did everything my mother wanted it to. People stopped her on the street. “Naturally curly!” they'd gasp. “She's
blesse
d
!” Pity my poor straight-haired sister. Jo Ann was pressed into biannual perms. Every six months she'd pass a chemical-scented afternoon at Best and Company, wired to black rods dangling from a chrome dome that shot electricity through her hair. She'd come home with a ridged coif that blasted out at the sides like Clarabell's. It took two weeks to calm down. After a month, it verged on normal, almost as if she too were blessed with naturally curly hair.

Something happened. One day in summer camp, bored during rest hour, I took the manicuring scissors out of my sewing kit and, without a mirror, gave myself a haircut. It was work. Manicuring scissors can't handle much more than a cuticle. But I had an hour and I kept at it, watching wispy letter
C
s waft down on my Camp Red Wing blanket.

“
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE
?” Mom shrieked on visiting day.

She marks the change in my hair to that self-inflicted haircut. It was no longer naturally curly. It grew back pure frizz. This dovetailed with the onset of puberty. Much as it alters your hips and breasts, puberty can reconfigure your follicles too. So can chemotherapy. Friends who have endured it invariably like their new hair better. Straights became curly. Curlies became straight. That said, I don't recommend chemotherapy as a hair treatment, although it's the only one I haven't tried.

From the ages of twelve through twenty-one, I slept in rollers with Scotch tape across my bangs. I left for college with my very own salon hood dryer. I spent my honeymoon in Barbados without getting my hair wet once. I've had my hair wound tight around my head like a turban at the late Louis-Guy D' on East Fifty-Seventh Street. Kenneth yanked it taut on rollers the width of a French bread. Philip torched it at Crimpers, once searing my temple so badly it left a scar the size of a calcium pill. Ralph at Bumble and Bumble stretched and fried it. I endured potash and lye and human Mexican placenta in a roach-ridden emporium above a strip joint on Broadway. Irons and flat wands. Cornrows with beads, cornrows without. Diet control. Dryers that parched my eyeballs. Sleeping with a stocking stretched over my head. Do-rags. Dippity-do and Dixie Peach. Beer and Miss Jessie's. Gels and sprays. Alberto VO5 and Toni home perms in reverse. I draw the line at the Japanese treatment. Formaldehyde is not for the living. Once, channeling the very beautiful Bernadette Peters, I visited a salon that specializes in curls. There are two in New York: Ouidad and Devachan. Both use a similar technique: drenching a wet head with their product, followed by scrunching (never combing or brushing), then letting the hair air-dry, which takes forever. You're not just waiting for water to evaporate. You've got four ounces of goop in there too. In theory, this results in the much-coveted “curl differentiation.” The curls separate. You have countless Shirley Temple springs. It's a look. It just isn't mine. And you have to do it every day or it gets mashed.

Three years ago, I tried the keratin treatment. How strange it is to get exactly what you want, exactly what you hoped for. Keratin works. My hair was straight in a way it had never been. Stick straight and shiny. It was life-changing. I immediately stopped having good days and bad days based on my hair. For as long as the keratin lasted (three months), I woke up flawless. I pulled my hair back in a scrunchy and it stayed there. I swam! I played tennis! I washed my hair and was good to go! A whole new world opened up, a world without hair anxiety. Men gazed at me with longing on the street. Maître d's led me to the best table. Doormen scurried to take my shopping bags. Smiling sales assistants elbowed each other to wait on me. The straight world was a new and better place. How different from my curly life, where people assume if my hair is out of control I am too. Once a stranger came up to me at a party, patted my mop, and said, “Tell me. I've got to know. Do you have straight pubic hair?”

Fact: not a single member of my family has curly hair. My mother gave up smoking during her pregnancy, and I blame my frizz on that jolt to her system. How I longed for her sleek Grace Kelly smoothness! It skipped a generation. Thank God my daughter has my mother's hair, not mine. I call it “metronome hair.” It sways in time with her hips when she walks. I doubt Polly ever rolls out of bed, faces the bathroom mirror, and says, What fresh hell is this?

HIGH-FUNCTIONING HAIR OBSESSIVES
rarely go it alone. We have a team. The products, the people. Right this very minute, under my sink, for when I go curly: John Frieda Frizz Ease Clearly Defined gel ($6), John Frieda Frizz Ease Dream Curls conditioner ($11), John Frieda Frizz Ease moisture barrier firm hold hairspray ($11), John Frieda Frizz Ease Unwind Curls calming cream ($6), Moroccanoil curl-defining cream ($36), Moroccanoil intense curl cream ($45), Kevin.Murphy Anti.Gravity oil-free volumizer ($37), Coppola color care shampoo ($15), Coppola color care conditioner ($20), Living Proof No Frizz restyling spray ($16).

For summertime, when I spring for the keratin treatment: Louis Licari Ionic Color Preservation System styling foam gel ($24), Louis Licari volumizing daily root lift for fine hair ($14), Lasio Hypersilk smoothing balm ($34), Living Proof Amp2 instant texture volumizer ($26), Living Proof styling cream ($29), Oribe dry texturizing spray ($42), and Rene Furterer Karité repairing serum ($30). I am one minuscule reason why the hair care industry, according to Goldman Sachs, is worth $38 billion a year in products alone. (Skin care comes in at $24 billion, and makeup, a mere $18 billion.)

In addition to products, I have a human team: I go to Louis Licari in New York every month for color with Kazu. Louis Licari, formerly a painter, is famous primarily for color, NBC's “Ambush Makeover,” and the latest hair tech. His salon isn't a “scene,” even though movie stars are getting washed in the sink next to mine. The people are authentic and friendly. I get cut by Bridgette or Max or Devi or Igor. Then they blow my hair out. And in the summer, a.k.a. Frizzball Season, Arsen gives me the Coppola keratin treatment, leaving my hair Joan Baez straight, ever the goal. I only do it once a year because it costs $500, and the older I get, the more the hair of my dreams ages me. So I have to choose: Do I want to look like Margaret Atwood, frizzy and old? Or Georgia O'Keeffe, straight and old? Briefly, in the hippie-dippie seventies, my hair was hot. Think of Julie Christie in
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
. But controlled hair and only controlled hair is in now. If you check beautyblitz.com, the “One Click From Gorgeous” website for everything beauty, you will notice that if a Beauty Blitz nape bun is messy, it is by design. If a tendril flops, it flops with precision. There is no room for frizzball on beautyblitz.com.

IT'S HAPPY-MAKING TO
find a Library of America newsletter in the mail. What a great organization. The LOA reprints the work of the best American authors in handsome acid-free editions. Supporters attend book events where many of them are photographed. Reading the latest issue, I realized something strange. Of the eighty-eight women pictured, only one had remotely curly hair. That would be the timeless beauty Jeannette Watson Sanger. Her hair had waves and bounce. No one had frizz.

According to
Scientific American
, there is no difference between hair and fur. So why do
Homo sapiens
come with such variety? In the animal kingdom, you don't see frizzy horses or kinky monkeys. You don't see straight-haired poodles or lanky-haired sheep. Was our species given bigger brains so we could worry about our hair? Hello, Darwin? Why us? Why me?

Sometimes I think of asking Kazu to bleach my hair Marilyn blond, then convincing Igor to cut it short enough to spike like Laurie Anderson's. I'd use enough glop to keep the spikes impervious and never think about my hair again. But I'm a coward. That said, please do not feel sorry for me. I've almost learned to live with it. And if I didn't fret about my hair, something else would take its place. I believe we are born with a cup of affliction and it is our destiny to keep that cup filled at all times. If something terrible happens, I forget about my hair. When my parents got sick, my hair was a nonissue. But here I am, an orphan now, back to worrying about my hair. Not that frizzy doesn't have an upside. On an airplane, I never have to ask for a pillow. In winter, my hair traps so much body heat I rarely need a hat. Caught in the rain, I look
better
as my hair flattens. Best of all, my toddler grandsons love it. They squeal and pat it and lose their hands in it. If there's anything better than Jack, Sam, and Miles patting my hair and laughing, tell me. You can't, can you.

And Be Sure to Tell Your Mother

ALEX KUCZYNSKI

M
y tribe is a hairless one. Two years ago, when I spit into a plastic vial and sent my saliva to 23andMe to have my genetic history mapped, one of the traits that came back—apart from being, oddly, closely related to Dr. Oz—was the following: “You are from people with the least amount of body hair on earth.” There was a map and an arrow pointing to a dot, somewhere between northern Europe and Scandinavia, and it basically said: You are here, and hairless. So when I grew pubic hair—probably sometime around eighteen years old—it was not a big deal. I never thought of grooming or plucking or shaving or bleaching; it seemed unnecessary and there wasn't very much to work with anyway. I also didn't own a bikini or have sex until my twenties—I know:
Freak!—
so there was no point.

When I was twenty-four, this changed. I found myself in Istanbul, in a hammam, at the suggestion of my friend Verkin. In the domed steam room, the attendants scrubbed me raw, massaged me, flayed me with scented tree branches, and anointed me. Then the
tellak
—the one who scrubs and flays and greases you up—took me by the hand to a private room off to the side and started asking pleasant questions in Turkish. She seemed encouraging, so I nodded affirmatively, even though the only phrases I understood in Turkish at the time were “cherry juice,” “Where is the toilet?” and “Enough with the rugs already.”

With an athletic abruptness, she flipped my legs over my head and started applying some sort of honeyed mixture to the hair of my pubic region. Within minutes, helpless to stop but cautiously willing, I was bare as a baby. Verkin wandered in to check on me. I lay on the marble slab, supine, stunned, stripped, feeling like a simultaneously pornographic and infantilized female version of the Lamentation of Christ.

“
Çok güzel
,” Verkin said in Turkish to the attendant, who smiled brightly at the praise of her work.
Very beautiful
. I will never forget those words. I associate them with shock and vulnerability—and chafing. I arrived back in the hotel, and my boyfriend remarked that I looked like an enormous eight-year-old, and we continued on our journey, which had started in the ecstatic hedonism of the Greek islands, through Turkey and on into the bound and covered-up monasticism of Syria, where I wore long sleeves, a long skirt, and a head scarf that covered my face. Underneath, my skin was naked, no hair below my eyebrows longer than a grain of rice. I would learn that in Islam, pubic and underarm hair is considered unclean for both sexes and is routinely shaved or waxed. In Syria, even though I felt like a filthy sex goddess / giant eight-year-old, I actually fit right in.

Years later, I often reflect on the paradox of the American woman, influenced by porn-star culture, stripping off her pubic hair, coerced into a state of enforced genital infancy, and her similarity to Muslim women all over the world. They spend their entire adult lives never seeing a pubic hair on their bodies—but in their case, it is for religious reasons. In one culture, porn rules; in the other, God. The result is the same.

In the past two decades, with the absorption of pornography into the American mainstream—pole-dancing aerobics classes, Abercrombie thong underwear for the six- to eight-year-old set, suburban couples making homemade porn movies, nip slips on television, Miley Cyrus basically doing anything—pubic hair has become a quasi-public marker of the self, a talisman of one's essential style, even though presumably very few people see what your pubic hair actually looks like. Books have been written about the many possibilities for pubic coifs. Women celebrities talk about their pubic hair in an open and casual way, and I am still not used to hearing it. It always strikes me as misguided, as if they believe this open kind of conversation is an empowering feminist move, wresting sexual discussion away from men and using it as their own device to convey sexual bravura. I found it profoundly embarrassing when Jennifer Love Hewitt revealed to the talk show host George Lopez that she had “vajazzled” her vulva. “A friend of mine Swarovski-crystalled my precious lady—and it shined like a disco ball,” she said, adding, “Women should vajazzle their vajayjays.” It made her feel better, she said, after a nasty breakup.

A brief aside on what vajazzling entails: someone strips all the hair off your vulva, labia, and anus and then glues crystals or pearls in some sort of decorative motif in place of the hair. (
Vajazzling
is a play on the words
vagina
and
Bedazzler
, which is a home appliance used to fasten rhinestones, studs, and patches to clothes and other material.) First of all: Don't google this. (Or the phrase “Willie Nelson vagina tattoo.”) You can't unsee it. (And you really can't unsee that Willie Nelson tattoo. It haunts me.) Second: Why would you want to put glue all over your vulva? How can you function while coated, privately, in rhinestones? Exercise? Make love? The actress was, of course, promoting a book about “female empowerment.” What I saw was a desperate celebrity trying to make headlines before she U-boated out of sight forever.

I WAS MORTIFIED
when I heard Gwyneth Paltrow publicly ramble on about growing a “seventies bush.” Why do I want to know this? Does she think it makes her seem more human, more natural, more down to earth, to talk about her wild and woolly pubic hair? In fact, it seems overly thought out, processed through the neural pathways of seventeen public relations executives, and delivered on a talk show for the sole purpose of having people (just like I am doing now! Brava!) repeat it.

In my twenties and thirties, I worked as a reporter and often subjected myself to projects that involved the body. There was a graphic front-page story for the
New York Observer
about my experience with colonic irrigation. I wrote a piece for the
New York Times
about women experimenting with Viagra for enhanced sexual gratification (I believe I was the first
New York Times
reporter to get the word
horny
into the paper of record). Later, I was asked by a women's magazine to get a “vajacial” and write about the experience. During the treatment, an aesthetician performed a cleansing “facial” treatment on my vulva, explaining why it was necessary: so many women get ingrown hairs from waxing, or they have irritated skin from dying their pubic hair hot pink or blue (often using a product called Betty Beauty, for “the hair down there”), or the glue from vajazzling creates clogged pores. The most disturbing part of the “vajacial” was that, unlike during a facial, when one's mouth is presumably closed to receive relaxing treatment of the entire facial region, one's mouth is not closed during a vajacial, and so you might find yourself making uncomfortable conversation with the vajacialist while she is nicking at ingrown hairs, pointing out areas that might benefit from a special vulva rejuvenation serum or from Pink Daisy labia bleaching cream, or suggesting the most gentle organic anal bleach (Dr. Pinks anal bleaching cream)—for next time.

TRIMMING OR REMOVING
pubic hair—the term for the preference for hairless genitals is
acomoclitism
—has long been a custom in many cultures for medical, religious, or cultural reasons. In ancient Egypt, removing hair meant fewer lice infestations. Greeks and Romans commonly removed all their body hair for aesthetic reasons. In Muslim cultures, depilation (removing the hair above the skin) or epilation (removing the entire hair including the root below the skin) is a basic hygienic ritual, on par with toothbrushing.

In the sixteenth century, Michelangelo felt it was appropriate to create a David with stylized pubic hair, and by the eighteenth century, female pubic hair was often the centerpiece of Japanese erotic art, but it was typically not until the twentieth century that the Western tradition showed women with pubic hair. The celebrated nineteenth-century art critic John Ruskin, who seemed to have learned all he knew about women from art, not life, was so put off by his new wife's body on their honeymoon—some think it was the sight of her pubic hair—that the marriage was annulled, unconsummated, years later. Ruskin never did get used to the notion of pubic hair and may have died a virgin.

When Gustave Flaubert traveled to Egypt in the 1840s, he marveled at the women's acomoclitic state: “The shaved cunts make a strange effect,” he wrote in his notes. “The flesh is as hard as bronze.” After an encounter with a prostitute brokered by a friend, he offers the following: “Firm flesh, bronze arse, shaven cunt, dry though fatty; the whole thing gave the effect of a plague victim or a leperhouse.”

The art and practice of pubic-hair maintenance traveled with Islam through northern Africa to Europe. In the 1860s, a Turkish diplomat commissioned Gustave Courbet to paint
L'Origine du monde
, with the proviso that the model brandish a full nest of pubic hair. The painting created a public scandal for its extremely naturalistic portrayal of a woman's bushy pubic mound and passed quietly through private collections before arriving at the Musée d'Orsay. It reminds me of the paintings of Lucian Freud and of the illustrations in
Th
e Joy of Sex
, which struck my preadolescent friends and me as scandalous. Why? Not because of the dozens of exotic sexual arrangements before us, but because the bodies in the drawings of men and women thus engaged were
so
strangely hairy.

By the twentieth century, after clashing with Victorian prudishness, pubic-hair styling became—if not de rigueur—fully acceptable among the soigné Continental set. In 1930s Europe, the car dealer Baron Martin Stillman von Brabus reportedly shaved the pubic hair of his lover, Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, into a representation of the Mercedes-Benz logo.

That seems commonplace next to the choices we have today. One can get temporary tattoos on one's vulva, a practice called “vatooing.” (And again, a gentle reminder: do not google the phrase “Willie Nelson vagina tattoo.”) There is Betty Beauty dye, available in a rainbow of colors. Of course, the insidious vajazzling. Using hot wax and a detail trimmer (basically a tiny razor)—and if you so choose, a product such as Coochy shave cream—one can strip and shape one's hair into a variety of shapes, which have each earned nicknames in the common parlance of the trade. There is the vafro, the sphynx (also known as the Yul Brynner or full monty), the Bermuda Triangle, the football or the furry hoop, the flame (also known as the teardrop or princess), the diamond, the marquise, the landing strip, pencil line, and the minimalist. There is the Chaplin, the postage stamp, the Hitler, and the rattail. I recently spent a week on a nude beach in Maui and was less fascinated by the exquisite bodies than by the precision craft on display in everyone's pubic region, both women and men. The young women sported dynamic shapes and flamboyant dye jobs; the young men had waxed their bodies entirely and all their pubic hair, leaving just a strip over the top of their penises. The effect was to make their penises seem, well, huge, like long, dangling hoses. I know several men, heterosexual, who go in for full wax jobs of the areas that are most hairy, also known in the trade as “back, sack, and crack.”

An entire current of contemporary art, pop culture, and commerce is dedicated to pubic hair. American Apparel recently featured storefront mannequins with fully hairy pubic regions. The artist Rhiannon Schneiderman created a series of portraits of herself wearing giant wigs over her pubic region. In England, Project Bush gathered together ninety-three women and photographed their pubic areas, in part to show young women and girls that it is entirely OK to have pubic hair. (One of Project Bush's creators was horrified to discover that girls as young as eleven and twelve were getting Brazilian bikini waxes.) The performance artist Julie Atlas Muz uses her vulva and vagina as a character in her work, Mr. Pussy. Mr. Pussy is made to speak, smoke cigarettes, and offer cultural commentary during “his” performances. Muz performs as Mr. Pussy to draw attention to the fact that the public sees feminine pubic hair as something frightening, something to be removed and waxed away. And in so doing, Muz recapitulates in her own way Denis Diderot's marvelous erotic novel
Th
e Indiscreet Jewels
, in which a magic ring placed on a woman's finger will allow her vulva to speak, delivering her opinion and point of view “from the most honest part.”

The trend that most disturbs me is women who have all their pubic hair lasered off, permanently, leaving them in a state of immortal prepubescence. I asked a group of such women why they would do such a thing—which is entirely irreversible—and the explanations made no sense to me. One woman said she did it because she was having her bikini line—just the sides—lasered off and why not just do the whole thing, for the slightest bit of price difference? Another said she never wanted to confront having gray pubic hair. Her comment reminded me of a friend who is going through horrible, excoriating chemotherapy, and who can't stand it when her fellow patients complain that the chemo treatments make them look so old. “I don't care about looking old,” she says. “I just want the privilege of being able to
be old
.”