Me, My Hair, and I by editor Elizabeth Benedict Read Free Book Online Page A

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