Perms; Or, Why I Should Not Be Allowed to Make Haircare Decisions

So I am not a vain person. But I do care enough that I am fairly diligent about my hair - I do always get it colored and highlighted (or else I'd have been a grey-haired 19 year old; I kid you not). And I take care of my hair, so it's generally pretty healthy. So I have healthy hair sitting on top of an entirely not healthy body, but so be it.

And while I have a lot of hair, it's very fine. To make matters worse, I am descended from a long line of women who seem to have a serious thinning problem at the front of their head (thanks mom and grandma!). The past couple of years have seen a few experiments in hairstyles to find various ways of masking this thinning, but essentially they've been variations on the same theme...that theme being some variant of the Jennifer Aniston "Rachel" cut...or that's at least what I see when I look in the mirror.

Or at least it used to be.

Because I had the brilliant idea to get a perm - lovely waves of full hair! Yes, a perm it would be! I decided to put away my Falco cassette and strip off my legwarmers for the night and actually get a permanant wave put in my hair (yes, I realize how very 80's this makes me - and not in the cool 80's way either). My hair stylist has been doing my hair for the past few years. And she's also a member of my family (by marriage, so...). Anyhow, so she did my color on a Monday and on the Thursday of that same week, she did my perm. Yes, dear readers, I was that stupid. And apparently so was a family member since she is the hair care professional and did not seem to register what a horrific mess two massive chemical processes would create of my hair when applied in such close proximity to one another. Once she started drying my hair after the perm rods were removed and the chemicals rinsed away, I knew something was not right. And I quickly realized something was very wrong. My hair was very wrong. And it was very fried, and it was very gnarly (and not in the cool gnarly way either), and I was not happy. In fact, I busted out with a "I HATE THIS! I HATE MY HAIR!" rather abruptly. She quickly whipped into action with a curling iron and much dexterity. It helped make the immediate mess slightly salvageable, but overall, it was a disaster. She even had to utter the phrase "Please do not cry" at least once, but maybe twice, and I soon thereafter spun into a whirling dervish in my head ("How can I leave here with my hair like this?" to "What in god's name will I do to fix this?" to "Is it a defensible action to kill a hair stylist for such an atrocity?").

The duration has been all-hair-all-the-time if you were to ask my husband, my mom, my sister, my BFF, or probably the dustbunnies collecting in my office. I had a couple of extremely non-helpful email exchanges with my family member who basically abdicated any responsibility in repairing my hair. I consulted with a new stylist. Her advice: do nothing. The hair is so damaged (or "singed" was the word she used repeatedly...lovely) that there's nothing to do at this point that might not cause further, and even worse, damage. Well, she did suggest some extensive overnight hair mask procedures, which after one night, have seemed to elicit some noticeable, however slight, improvement. So I will keep up her recommended hair regimen to see if my hair returns to some semblance of normalcy again. Who'd ever have thought I'd long for the days of my out-of-date, unflattering "Rachel" style. Oy!

Almost as frustrating as the hair itself has been my hair stylist's/family member's role in all of this. She is the professional after all, not me. Why did she not warn me about the potential damage of the two treatments? Why did she not accept some responsibility for correcting what was obviously a mess she (quite largely, in my opinion) contributed to? Why did she just not tell me no one gets perms anymore because they're bad for your hair, your self-esteem (when they go so awry), and probably the penguins in Antartica and the puppies in the pound. These things are evil!

So I promise this will be the last (public) tirade on the current, tragic state of my hair. But if you see a girl with a giant mop of frizzy, overprocessed, and over-chemically treated hair walk past you, send a kind thought her way and take pity on her frizz.