14 Days Till 30: Good Hair

| Posted by Lou | The time is 4.16pm here in London UK |

Good Hair. Something I have strived for my whole life. I started out well with a full head of long, curling, golden-blonde hair. Then it started to get out of control.

Then I got that haircut - the one when I was 12-years-old that looked like a mop (I know this because other kids in my school helpfully shouted "mop!" at me to let me know) and turned my tresses brown and straight.

Then as I grew it longer it became frizzier and more out of control (again, this one was eventually helpfully made known to me after I enquired of a school-"friend" who this "baff" person I hear so much about was, to be told it was me).

And suddenly it seemed like Good Hair was a distant dream that would never be reality to me, as I made the mental shift towards being somebody who has Bad Hair.

I was flicking through old photos last night to find examples of the different attempts at controlling my hair, and discovered that there is a distinct pattern in my attempts to "do my hair":

Yep, the good old "just shove it in a bun" approach to hair. A sure sign of someone who has no idea what the fuck to do with it. (And probably better than the "wear it down to show off the straggly dead ends" option...)

But before you all suggest different ways of doing hair, please let me interject with the fact that in reality I spend about 5 minutes on my appearance in the morning, of which 20 seconds is devoted to my hair. I then pull it out, put it back in, pull it out, put it back in about a thousand times throughout the day.

I had a moment the other day when I was in a meeting involving our Managing Director and had pulled my hair out of its bun and was flicking it around my fingers and playing with my hair-tie, and I realised the MD was looking at me strangely.

At which point I finally clicked that Real Adults don't sit there playing with their hair at work. They do their hair, and they leave it like that all day (whether it's in or out).

So now that I'm a nearly-30-year-old I probably need to crank up the Good Hair quest so that I can have hair so good that I neither need to spend time on it in the morning, nor fiddle around with it all day.

I guess Step 1 was dying it red, to give it a bit of inherent oomph.

Step 2 is to get it cut more often (when I got it cut last Friday it was 7 months since the last cut (yes, my ends were disgustingly dead)), and get it cut better.

Step 3 is to stop resting on the adequacy of my satisfactory hair product (a curl crème that is better than all of the previous products I have ever tried, but not great) and seek the holy grail (great curl crème).

Step 4 is to use all the various subtle methods of keeping it moisturised (Bel said to towel dry before using conditioner, I had added to this putting a shower cap on over the conditioner and leaving for at least 4 minutes).

And Step 5 is to stop fiddling with it.

In the meantime, I am challenging myself to go from now to my 30s without a single use of "shove it in a bun".