I seem to have lost the habit of going to the hairdresser.I used to cherish those hours of pampering and banal chat. ‘What we going to do, today, then?’ ‘Oooh, pretty much exactly the same as the last time . . .’
Maybe, it is the horror of the question, ‘Been anywhere nice, lately?’ that puts me off.Of course, I haven’t! Blooming, interminable Covid. Still, it would be good to get a brighten-up and tidy before .
A barnet is so often a person’s defining feature: just think of Boris’s mop-top or Margaret Thatcher’s Elnett-sprayed helmet.
Some hold oddly robust opinions about others’ hair-dos.My mother is snippy about women of a certain age having long tresses, or men’s hair curling over the collar. She saw no fringe benefits in the hairdressing-hiatus of .
Patricia Nichol picks out a selection of the best books on hair — including Matrix by Lauren Groff (pictured left) and The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris (pictured right)
There are literary characters whom we learn to love through their hair.
In children’s literature, Pippi Longstocking, carrot-topped Anne of Green Gables and, of course, Little Women’s magnificent Jo March who lops off her locks to raise funds for her mother to visit her poorly father. ‘Your hair! Your one beauty,’ wails her sister Beth.
But Jo gives her short shrift. ‘It will do my brains good to have that mop taken off.’
Modern American attitudes to women and hair are explored in the satirical The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris. Nella is delighted when the New York publishing firm she works for employs another young black female graduate.But soon, with good reason, Nella’s enthusiasm curls up and dies.
In Matrix by Lauren Groff, Marie de France is banished to a nunnery, where she must undergo a humiliating ritual of scrubbing and hair-binding to show how her freedoms have been curtailed.
Undine Spragg, the anti-heroine of Edith Wharton’s The Custom Of The Country, leads a wholly different life; one dedicated to a pursuit of pleasure amid others’ admiration. Named after the hair-crimper her grandfather invented, the beautiful Undine, with her rose-gold tresses, 넷마블포커 arrives in New York determined to conquer it.
These books are a cut above, whatever the state of your hair.