Last week, I got it into my head that I should definitely cut my hair before the end of next week (December 9). Why, you may ask? I just decided it should be so for no particular reason. So I called up the salon to make an appointment with my favorite hair stylist, N. It turned out that N was on vacation and would be back only on the 15th of December which was beyond my hair-cut deadline. So though I had misgivings (I really need to start listening to these nagging doubts) I scheduled an appointment with another stylist for last Saturday.
Saturday noon I set off with great enthusiasm to the salon - phew, after months of long (by my standards) hair, finally I was going to get a new look with shorter hair. The new stylist, S, was a very friendly lady. She chatted about general stuff with me and then asked what I wanted her to do with my hair. So I said "Please cut it to shoulder length, with layers around the face".
She was aghast at the amount of hair I wanted to chop off and literally wailed "But why? You have such beautiful hair!" I said I was bored of my long hair. She confirmed with me again before starting to cut, "Are you sure you want to cut this?"
When I confirmed with a "Yes" again, she said more to console herself than me "Oh well, it will grow back." Then the cutting began.
She seemed to be doing lots of "different" kind of cutting with her scissors. Though I was interested by this new style of cutting, I guess I must have unconsciously looked alarmed for S reassured me, "Don't worry, I am just giving you the layers." At that point, my hair was still wet and was looking funky and cool. "Nice!" I thought "Hmm, maybe I should make S my regular hairdresser instead of N."
Then the cutting was done and she started to blow-dry my hair. Which was when I looked at myself in the mirror again and thought "Okay, my hair looks weird now. But maybe it will look better when she is done." Then, after some more drying and styling, S declared she was done and added (I wonder how much effort it took for her to keep a straight face), "You look so beautiful now!"
I glanced at myself in the mirror. Right! I looked like a Roman gladiator with a hair helmet :-(! Finally, I could understand the concern S had before she began to cut my hair! Did S have a premonition of this butchery? There was nothing left to be said so I just tipped her and left.
So right now, I have the ignominy of having hair which has such a weird shape that I can't quite describe it in words. I cribbed about this flop show to L and V during lunch today. L was sweet and told me that it did not look too bad and anyways it would grow out. V gleefully chimed in and chortled, "But you do know that a bad haircut looks even worse when it is growing out. Ha ha!" Sigh!
Now I need to locate my supply of hair clips so that I can hold all the chopped bits of hair in place so that even if it looks dowdy it at least looks non funny :-(.
And in commemoration of this event, here is the famous sher from Maine Pyar Kiya:
Yeh zulfain hain tumhari,
Ya resham ke jaal!
Kitne khush-naseeb hain woh
Kitne khush-naseeb hain woh
Choohe
Jinhone katre tumhare baal
Sob :-(!
Lessons learnt:
* Listen to nagging doubts.
* Don't have stupid artificial deadlines.
* Wearing scarves/woollen caps when going out might be the way to go this winter.
* If I want to get my hair butchered, I should at least go to a place which will do it at a much lesser cost.
Showing posts with label Hair. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hair. Show all posts
Monday, December 03, 2007
Monday, December 18, 2006
Hair today gone tomorrow
This weekend, at long last I went to the salon to get a long pending haircut. The hair stylist was mercifully not one of those chattering kinds (I am pretty poor at doing polite conversation) and I had all the time in the world to think and observe as the stylist went about her job. This stylist was different from the other stylists I have been too - after cutting each side, she would not look at my hair to compare if it was even, instead she would hold the ends with her fingers, stare at the ceiling and feel if it was even or not! Wow, how much experience she must have to achieve that (needless to say, she did a good job and I am happy with my haircut).
As with all my other sudden career aspirations, I suddenly started wondering how it would be to work in a beauty salon. But it was not as if this was so totally out of the blue.
You see, since childhood, me and my sister have found tons of outlets for our creativity in the make-up area - mainly because, on both dad's and mom's sides of the family, we are either the eldest or near to the eldest among all the cousins. So we always had an entire brood of younger cousins at our disposal on whom we could try our "talents".
Since childhood, we have polished lots of nails, applied lipstick to lots of lips, lined a lot of eyes, dressed up lots of "kings" and "queens" - either because the younger cousins asked us to do so or more often, because we felt like experimenting (of course, us being the honorable akkas (big sisters), our younger cousins were only too delighted to be the models - unfortunately, now they are all grown up and don't have quite the same adoration for us any more :-(). Anyways, dressing the cousins up was a good pasttime for us. We were reasonably okay at doing it and as we grew older, we sometimes even helped the "elders" with their make-up and clothes.
However, it was only after reaching the hostel that I discovered my flair with hair (ah, that rhymes :-)). I don't quite remember how it happened but it was during the first semester of my first year in hostel. AD, one of my first year hostel mates, whom I hardly knew, somehow decided that I should cut her hair for her. I was thrilled to get a volunteer for my experiments with hair and agreed immediately.
AD wanted it shorter than her present just-above-the-waist length hair but did not specify just how short. I started off with great enthusiasm. There were five other girls in the room as audience. They all sat on the cots to watch while AD sat on the floor in the center on a bunch of spread out newspapers. I knelt behind her with the scissors.
Initially, the process went off pretty smoothly. But then I realized that one side of AD's hair was slightly shorter than the other. So I chopped off some more hair from the longer side. And, you guessed it, now that side was shorter than the other side. So snip, snip, snip I went on the other side. Oh no, now the other side was shorter than the previously shorter side.
At this point, word had gotten around the hostel first year students that someone was getting their hair cut and that it looked as if it was going to be lots of fun. The number of girls in the audience had now swelled to a dozen. More wanted to come in but there was no space and I was getting distracted with all the attention.
Finally, the doors to the room were closed but people continued to peer in through the windows - I guess everyone was betting about whether AD will have all her hair shorn off or not with my monkey and the pie act or not :-(.
Anyways, the bright spot was, since AD could not see her hair herself, she cheerfully asked me to continue doing what I thought was right. Eventually, when her hair had reached shoulder length, both sides had finally equalled out and I was done. AD marched to the mirror - everyone held their breath to see what her reaction would be to her considerably shortened hair.
AD took one look at herself and went "Oooooooooh, thank you so much - this looks so nice". And actually, it was true - AD has really fine hair and the free flowing shoulder length hair instead of her usual single thin pigtail made her look cute. Ta da - success by accident :-D!
After that, requests poured (okay, a few of them came) in for the miracle hair-stylist ;-) - I once even cut someone's hair using a pair of ultra tiny foldable scissors as we could not find the regular sized ones (ah, the things we did in hostel). After that word got around that I could help with other "make-up stuff" too. So during the final year of undergrad, during college functions, I helped with eye-liners, drawing elaborate free hand bindi patterns etc. - it was fun to experiment on different people :-)!
Sitting at the salon that day brought back all these memories.That's when it struck me - being a beautician would give me a lot of subjects to experiment on and what's more, actually get paid for it - cooool :-)! Is it too late to start learning to be a beauty specialist?
Acknowledgement: Thank you Saranya for acting as the initial catalyst in bringing up the memories :-)!
As with all my other sudden career aspirations, I suddenly started wondering how it would be to work in a beauty salon. But it was not as if this was so totally out of the blue.
You see, since childhood, me and my sister have found tons of outlets for our creativity in the make-up area - mainly because, on both dad's and mom's sides of the family, we are either the eldest or near to the eldest among all the cousins. So we always had an entire brood of younger cousins at our disposal on whom we could try our "talents".
Since childhood, we have polished lots of nails, applied lipstick to lots of lips, lined a lot of eyes, dressed up lots of "kings" and "queens" - either because the younger cousins asked us to do so or more often, because we felt like experimenting (of course, us being the honorable akkas (big sisters), our younger cousins were only too delighted to be the models - unfortunately, now they are all grown up and don't have quite the same adoration for us any more :-(). Anyways, dressing the cousins up was a good pasttime for us. We were reasonably okay at doing it and as we grew older, we sometimes even helped the "elders" with their make-up and clothes.
However, it was only after reaching the hostel that I discovered my flair with hair (ah, that rhymes :-)). I don't quite remember how it happened but it was during the first semester of my first year in hostel. AD, one of my first year hostel mates, whom I hardly knew, somehow decided that I should cut her hair for her. I was thrilled to get a volunteer for my experiments with hair and agreed immediately.
AD wanted it shorter than her present just-above-the-waist length hair but did not specify just how short. I started off with great enthusiasm. There were five other girls in the room as audience. They all sat on the cots to watch while AD sat on the floor in the center on a bunch of spread out newspapers. I knelt behind her with the scissors.
Initially, the process went off pretty smoothly. But then I realized that one side of AD's hair was slightly shorter than the other. So I chopped off some more hair from the longer side. And, you guessed it, now that side was shorter than the other side. So snip, snip, snip I went on the other side. Oh no, now the other side was shorter than the previously shorter side.
At this point, word had gotten around the hostel first year students that someone was getting their hair cut and that it looked as if it was going to be lots of fun. The number of girls in the audience had now swelled to a dozen. More wanted to come in but there was no space and I was getting distracted with all the attention.
Finally, the doors to the room were closed but people continued to peer in through the windows - I guess everyone was betting about whether AD will have all her hair shorn off or not with my monkey and the pie act or not :-(.
Anyways, the bright spot was, since AD could not see her hair herself, she cheerfully asked me to continue doing what I thought was right. Eventually, when her hair had reached shoulder length, both sides had finally equalled out and I was done. AD marched to the mirror - everyone held their breath to see what her reaction would be to her considerably shortened hair.
AD took one look at herself and went "Oooooooooh, thank you so much - this looks so nice". And actually, it was true - AD has really fine hair and the free flowing shoulder length hair instead of her usual single thin pigtail made her look cute. Ta da - success by accident :-D!
After that, requests poured (okay, a few of them came) in for the miracle hair-stylist ;-) - I once even cut someone's hair using a pair of ultra tiny foldable scissors as we could not find the regular sized ones (ah, the things we did in hostel). After that word got around that I could help with other "make-up stuff" too. So during the final year of undergrad, during college functions, I helped with eye-liners, drawing elaborate free hand bindi patterns etc. - it was fun to experiment on different people :-)!
Sitting at the salon that day brought back all these memories.That's when it struck me - being a beautician would give me a lot of subjects to experiment on and what's more, actually get paid for it - cooool :-)! Is it too late to start learning to be a beauty specialist?
Acknowledgement: Thank you Saranya for acting as the initial catalyst in bringing up the memories :-)!
Monday, October 24, 2005
Bad hair day
I have always had a head full of hair. Apparently even when I was born the nurses and doctors in the hospital expressed surprise as I had a head well-endowed with thick wavy hair in spite of being born some 20 days early. Things did not change as I grew up. Everyone used to exclaim upon seeing my thick tresses. Hairdressers used to get exhausted by the time they got through the entire jungle on my head. Jungle? Yes, you read right. For though some people seemed to envy all that hair, I was sick of having a mane which made me resemble "sai baba" on the slightest provocation. I had also had enough of the "birds nest" and "medusa on a bad morning" remarks from the non-admirers. So after spending years trying to cut it into a manageable shape, I grew my hair out and thick pony tails became my all time in vogue hairstyle.Then I joined the hostel. And for the first time in my life I understood what others meant when they complained about falling hair. Every time I got anything anywhere near my head, my hair fell. I felt close to tears whenever I had to have a hair wash. All my previous curses unfortunately worked and within a year, my hair volume had decreased by half :-(. Hairdressers no longer sighed in despair when I landed at their parlours. Other than that, I was still stuck with wavy, frizzy and now thin :-( (by my hitherto lofty standards) hair. I just decided it was my lot in life and finally accepted it.
Then I got to come abroad for my graduate studies. For the first time in my life, I saw that for most part, all women had nice frizz-free, well-styled hair. It then struck me that not all these women could have been born that way. My eyes were then opened to a whole new world of hair care products. Gels, mouse, hairspray, shine serum, smoothing milk - you name it! My purse had found a new outlet! A believer of miracles, each time I went to the store I would come back with a new hair care product to try out. For the first time in my life I actually got some say in what my hair looked like. But since it was mostly trial and error I had to leave the results to luck more than anything else.
Then the straightening rage hit. I had gone to India for vacation and even ppl with super straight hair were getting chemical straightening done. My sis urged me to try it too and I was like "why not?". I spent a good 4 hours of my life at the parlor while the hair-dresser patiently straightened every unruly hair on my head. When she was done, boy, was I pleased! For the first time in my life I could safely let my hair free and I had got a whole new look. Compliments poured in. And, most importantly, for the first time in my life I could not see any frizz!! Hallelujah!
That was over a year ago. I had done the semi-permanent straightening and the effects have begun wearing off. I am once again fighting a losing battle with frizz. My cosmetics cupboard has dozens of half-used bottles of sprays, serums, lotions and creams all of which promise to reduce frizz. I wish I could tell you that I have found a miracle cure - but not yet. I really think I should ask one of those well-groomed women how they do it. In the mean time, if you are selling any anti-frizz solution, let me know. I will buy a bottle.
And a last sign off thought:
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