Girl News - Girls and Hair

Hair is a crown of jewels/thorns/whatever. I’m super into hair because it’s an easy way to tool around with everything about girl-dom and it feels good to touch and play with. When it gets past your shoulders (the ideal hair length is “nipple,” I think) and you see it in front of you all the time it’s like a lil’ buddy. Hair is the fastest way to look like something, and the fastest way to look like something different. It is imbued with incredibly potent symbolic powers of sex, femininity, cultural capital, success, and monaaaay, that run from Athens to the bible to Oprah to Britney to Beyonce, who has elected to become a white lady, I guess?

HEAD SHAVING
Not actually interesting. If you want to rebel in high school it’s probably a better idea to go on tour with a high-concept spoons-band you made up—go; do it—or drop out and do something else weird, instead of undermining your own terrific beauty. Or whatever. Actually, shaved heads look really good on some girls, so sometimes you’re not even doing that. Think it through is what I mean. I have some truly hideous hobo-symbol tattoos because I wanted my mom to be mad at me, and now I still have them and want to hang out with her all the time. You know?

BANGS
“Should I get bangs?” is, to me, an effective boner softener, not a legit girl concern. Stop. Stop asking me this. Stop saying this. Hair is an often-effective public expression of private ideas (and does it almost as readily as fashion, but way cheaper and easier); it’s not to be crowd-sourced like your next nail-art extravaganza.

When did bangs get imbued with the sensualities of now-deceased French film actresses/whores? How can bangs carry all of that, plus the hipster baggage (best part of Girls is when Lil’ Mamet says “My smallest baggage is IBS”), plus the manic Zooey-Zoobie-Zoo Mentos-commercial appeal of sweetiepie bangs? That is too many different kinds of sexy associations for some hairs, you guys.

NATURAL HAIR COLOR AND TEXTURE
No experience with this. I mean, it is almost always the correct aesthetic choice. I just don’t know anything about not approaching hair as if it’s material for your Art Basel project that’s about, like, all human suffering.

WHY OLDER IS BETTER
Come around to the notion that turning another year older is better for you—you, conceptually—than not. My third-grade hair was a Christmas-tree-shaped affair the color of boredom and book nerdery. My now-hair is just how I like it, which is maximum big-ness and blonde-ness. I’m not saying it looks “good,” I’m saying it looks “right.”

BLONDE
Girls like to be blonde because all the bleach and processing makes relatively shiny, flat hairs go DayGlo and puffed-out like a Cheeto. OOOOH CHEETOS! (Chester Cheetah and I haven’t bro-ed down in a while, which directly correlates to not smoking pot. You know when you’ve had a few and the Cheeto dust is on your fingertips and then you try to get it off but it just rolls into little hot-orange chem-balls? I want to make a bet that those get covered in waxed chocolate and sold as a snack for children within two years and it’s called “Cheetos Max.”) I usually characterize the blonde I like/want as “cotton candy blonde” which is not only a ref to the muted pastel of it but also the whipped, hand-to-heaven consistency. Ultra-blonde hair should float a few inches away from your face, that’s how you know you’re done.

MONEY
Look, politically, I am pro-retardation, like, “Why would you buy a Ford Focus when you can spend the equivalent to cry in a hair salon bathroom every six weeks?” There are girls, probably half of girls, who are advocates of home hair color and NBD haircuts and who might use a Groupon for an updo, and I guess that’s fine before you’re 25 or whatever. So do that. But the way you know you’re a real grownie is when the idea of having someone you aren’t emotionally attached to cut your hair is like an anarchy of anathema (that means “no”).

EXTENSIONS
Since I incidentally already wrote “when left alone for too long, owing to the inevitable dearth of hair-maintenance time between Rockstar-and-Absolut benders and all-day blackouts, they start to look like matted poo-sticks formulated by a vitamin-deficient diet of Rockstar and Absolut and cum and plastic glitter and choked-back bile and Premium Plus“ about hair extensions, I can just moonwalk backwards into the pool and do some handstands instead of telling you about them again, right?

BABY HAIRS
Those little inchy-hairs that halo your hairline are technically “broken” but girls like to think of them as (“dateable” just kidding) “baby hairs.” I have a lot of these ATM because of the recent two-day bleach assault I conducted on my roots and I kind of think they are sweet and adorable, like babies.

OMBRE
Every single one of my g-fries (that’s… going too far, isn’t it?) has ombre, except for my two best-bests (who are Jewish and Indian—if I were to BFF-up with another head of wilted-blondey-brown hairs the WASP-neurons would interact and spark and it would be a fire hazard). “Ombre” is confusing because it means several things: 1) a color that fades lighter and lighter, so that the ends of long or longish hair are progressively blonder (which is convenient because the ends of long or longish hair are like double-baked hay, even without the bleach, anyway), and 2) a half-one, half-the-other-color (Kevin Murphy makes those cool “color bugs” of purple or pink or orange BUT NO BLUE SO WHAT IS THE POINT IF IT DOESN’T MATCH MY SWIMMING POOL EYES?) and also 3) a color thing where the stylist, who hates you, backcombs the length of your abused hair (my hair is scared as shit of me but where else is it going to live?) so that the bleach goes on unevenly and eventually, after your stylist’s assistants (who also hate you) comb your hair with four hands at once, looks less like a thick white stripe and more, like, “natural.” (HAHAHAHAHHA)

HAIRCUTS
If you have that rad, thick, wavy hair I kind of don’t understand why you’d go to a professional at all? Anything your roommate can do with kitchen shears is going to blend in anyway, right? If you have dark, thick, wavy hair and you aren’t just showing a picture of a 10-year-old boy to your friend and saying “Go,” you’re incorrect.

PUBES
Boring to talk about.

COFFEE
Look, I like getting a coffee at the hair place as much as the next dummy, but can I just say? That the iced coffee at the Andy Lecompte Salon in West Hollywood? Is a motherfucking Elysian daydream?

LONG HAIR
It’s cute how much girls cling to long hair as the easiest youth ‘n’ hotness signifier, when in actual fact the longer the hair the more dead cells you have sprouting out of your head, which is neither youthful nor hot. I think it's also an excellent example of why it’s smarter to acknowledge the dumbnesses of girl life than just, like, pretending they are for real. (Related: acknowledging the crucial-ness of hair and its inherent dumbnesses is why I get two haircuts a year instead of ten.) This might be why so many future-smart Star Trek ladies just have crop cuts. (That might or might not be true, I’ve never seen Star Trek.) (Because I know about sex.)

BALLYAGE
This is when you get highlights painted on your hair instead of mushed into it and wrapped in foil.

SMUDGE
This is when you get a brown-ish color-fade at the roots instead of having a lighter wheat-field meeting up with cold, dead, black roots. (Maybe they do this for redheads too, but I don’t know/associate with gingers.) (Just kidding!) (???)

LINDSAY LOHAN
My friend Tiyana and I were cruising Opening Ceremony when this lady of indeterminate age pulled up in the good kind of Porsche and shopped alongside us for a while and we were kind of like “What’s this old bish doing here?” Then the sales dudes started hustling over various tight dresses and being really excited and it was Linsday Lohan. I think the point is that while she is very tall and very thin and still very beautiful and smells soooo good, her weird white fondant hair was just TOO THE FUCK MUCH and from a tiny bit away she looked like her mom. Just saying, I guess.

POOL HAIR
Chlorine makes your hair green and salt water makes your hair look and smell like the beach.

Previously - Girls and Moms

@KateCarraway