Much Ado About Hair

Hair is vitally personal to children.  They weep vigorously when it is cut for the first time; no matter how it grows, bushy, straight or curly, they feel they are being shorn of a part of their personality.  ~Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography, 1964

Miss PreTeen wants to do hair rebonding during the year-end school holidays. She was born rather bald, then when her hair started growing it came out in beautiful little ringlet curls. I was her first hairdresser and I gave her haircuts until she was about 6 or 7. Then her curls disappeared when she grew her hair really long...probably due to the weight of her hair. Now it's slightly wavy but she would prefer it really straight. Everyday she uses the hairdryer to straighten out her wavy fringe. She'll be a full-fledged teenager in a few months' time and it seems that bad hair days cannot exist in Teen World.

CoolTeen also didn't have much hair as a baby and when his hair grew, it was really fine and straight. It used to stand straight up on his head and he would always wear a cap to flatten his hair down. He really hated getting his hair cut and we always had to bring a toy or biscuits to distract him whenever we took him for a haircut. To make it less traumatizing for him I bought a hair clipper (the electric one that the barber uses) and became his hairdresser when he was about 3. Boys being boys, he could never sit still and I had to give him loads of books to read to make him keep his head still for about 20 minutes before he starts to fidget. Hubby took him for haircuts at the nearby barbershop when he turned 5, and both father and son would go for haircuts together. When CoolTeen turned 13, he decided that the barbershop hairstyles were not so cool and he tried hair salons instead. His hair is his treasure and he would stand in front of every reflective surface to check his hair and make sure every strand is in place, something that he still does now. One time I caught him using one of my shiny new pot covers in the kitchen to check his hair! Till now he still hates to get his hair cut and would try to cut as little as possible whenever he goes to the hairdresser, much to my annoyance...so I let him be and I tell him that I get to save money on his haircuts when he gets a free haircut in school...courtesy of the discipline teacher!

As for me, I must admit that I have always been rather vain. I loved to change my hairstyle ever since I was in primary school, and I had a scrap book with pictures of different hairstyles that I cut out from my mom's magazines. I would put my hair in curlers when I was about 10 or 11. When I was 12 I cut my own hair with the help of 3 mirrors, so that I could see the side and back of my head, and it didn't turn out too bad. My mom really thought that I would become a hairstylist one day. I have tried all kinds of hair styles - short, long, straight, curly. Just last week I permed and coloured my hair in one day against my hairdresser's advice...something I have never tried before (yes, I'm a risk-taker)... and the results were rather disastrous. My hair turned really dry and frizzy. The funny thing is that expensive products couldn't tame it but the cheap one did...strange.

Found this funny quote on the internet:

A fine head of hair adds beauty to a good face, and terror to an ugly one. ~Lycurgus

How true, haha.