To Perm or Not to Perm

I have straight hair. But not just straight hair. After I wash my hair, if I don’t touch it, it dries looking like a soggy flop of al-dente spaghetti. Yellow and straight and boring as a pile of dead strands of protein (which is literally what hair is, but who wants it to look like that?)

If I do nothing, it dries like fur of a wet Australian shepherd.

When I take the time to care, I have to mousse, flip, blow, diffuse, dry, fluff, spray…it’s a whole ordeal, just to make it look like human hair, and not a flat, stringy mop. I’ve always been jealous of the curly-haired girls. (Ya ya, the grass is always greener… we all want what we don’t have, yada yada. I know. But really, they have it better.)

Lately, the liberal, hippie, Harvard feminist in me has cared less about doing my hair. Claiming to value the pursuit of authenticity, but really just valuing the extra sleep more, there were a lot of ponytails and buns in graduate school. 

But I’ve always clung onto the dream to step out of the shower, and have hair that dries looking like this…

I wanted that effortless, authentically gorgeous hair. Now was the time. I became desperately obsessed with the idea of pumping in a pound of harmful chemicals to rip apart my hair’s natural bonds. All in the noble pursuit of authentic beauty.

My mother and I have gone back and forth about this for years. She’d previously talked me out of it at least three times, but this time I was determined. She warned, “Don’t get a perm. It never looks the way you want it, then it falls out in 3 weeks, and it just ruins your hair. From my experience, it’s never worth it.”

Pssshhh. Silly mommy. I’m a grown up. She simply doesn’t understand. I don’t want one of those poodle perms from the 80s. And America now has self-driving cars. Surely the technologies of perm solutions have developed since she last got a perm decades ago, into no-damage perfection.  

So I called around to prove my mother wrong—I talked to 4 different salons. All of whom said, “You’ve had bleach in your hair? If you came into my studio, I wouldn’t touch it. I’ve been doing hair for __years [usually 20+] and you don’t want a perm.”

Stubbornly undeterred, I wandered in-person into a Hair Cuttery, and asked a young, spunky, seemingly competent woman if she thought it was possible. She ran her fingers through my hair, chuckled out loud, with the confidence of a revolutionary, “Of COURSE we can perm your hair! No problem.”

So smugly, I sat in the chair to be “rolled.” I’d obviously found the only competent hairdresser in the greater Cambridge area. My new best friend.

She talked to me about adjusting my expectations--it wouldn’t be movie star, perfectly quaffed and voluminous… it was probably going to be something a little more subtle, and natural-looking. So I figured something like this:

I was ok with that. Who wouldn’t be? Expectations sufficiently adjusted.

So I started chatting with my new best friend:

            “How long have you been doing this?”            

            “Funny story… I wanted to be a hairdresser when I was 17, but then I got pregnant, I couldn’t go back to school officially till last year…I’ve been official for 6 months. But don’t worry, and I did hair for my neighbors and stuff for 10 years.”

            “Oh. Well good.”

            “But don’t worry. At school, we had an older group of patrons, I did like 10-20 perms a week.”

            “Oh. Cool.”

She was clearly a novice, and her only experience had been with old ladies…Why did I trust her over the four experts I’d consulted? Stupid confidence bias.

…so came the slow dawning that this might be a terrible mistake.

But it was too late. She’d already defied her boss in front of the whole salon.  Everyone saw my girlish excitement. I was committed.

And every step along the way she kept saying, “Stop worrying, it looks great.”

…

She moussed, squished, blowed, and squished and sprayed, so it looked kind of wavy… and I left the shop with a sinking feeling in my stomach. As it dried, the waves relaxed, and ultimately disappeared, and the frizz slowly started to emerge.  This wasn’t the kind of gorgeous volume I pictured.

In the end, my hair was a slightly fluffy, mostly stringy, helmet of frizzy, damaged fuzz.

Crossing my fingers that my source of perm knowledge—Elle Woods—wouldn’t fail me, I washed my hair that night in the hopes of deactivating the immonium thygocolate. 

Then I called my source of all other knowledge, my mother.

As goes the moral of so many stories:

“Mom…You were right…”