Leesh on Vintage: Vintage Hair to Vintage Hair

Hair. Each and every strand on your head is dead. It doesn't matter how many times someone says your hair is beautiful and healthy--it's still dead. We don't like to think of it that way though. We think of hair along the lines of our security or as an opportunity for expression. We can hide behind it, twist it when we're nervous, cut it when we need change in our lives or style it to fit our mood. So much of our personality surfaces in our hair. So much that you would think we were all trying to bring our dead hair back to life.

In the last year, I've changed my hair three times. Actually just in the last six months. I must be my constantly hair changing Mother's daughter. In June, I chopped my sun damaged and multiple split ended locks reaching my mid-back into a bowl cut. That's right. Abowl cut. I saw a photo of modern day super model Agnyss Deyn with one and thought that maybe I could pull off her coolness factor if I had her cut. Unfortunately, I ended up looking like Dorothy Hamil. Nothing against Dorothy. I'm sure she's a lovely person and am well aware that she and her haircut had many fans back in the 1970's, but I was feeling disturbingly dated...and not in a spiffy vintage way. Since Deyn's cut was also dyed black, I decided to do the same with a store bought hair coloring box. After blowing it dry, styling it all under with a curling iron and shining it with some finishing gloss, I looked in the mirror and had the unnerving realization that a Beatle was staring back at me. Maybe Ringo?

My hair grew out by September for my brother Clayton's wedding. Thank God. I felt feminine again. The black dye wore off and the sun allowed for my natural highlights to prominently peak through. With the curling iron, I flipped the ends of my hair outward. Although I loved this look, there was an innocense that I wasn't sure about. After all, I'm not a little girl...and I'm single. Should I have a little more sex appeal? When I studied Jean Shrimpton for one of the inspirational icon Monday posts, I discovered we had the same hair and found her to be incredibly sexy. The cut was therefore a keeper.

A couple of weeks ago, I made an appointment for a trim. Maybe half an inch off or so. I hadn't cut it since June and by the beginning of February, the ends were screaming that a trim was past due. Not wanting to spend too much on a trim, I decided to go to another salon I found on Yelp.com. The reviews said it would cost $45...not so bad for L.A. Walking in, I felt like I was in a demented Candy Land, however. Bright pink skulls, colored spike headbands for sale, and pink and blue hair extentions being put on the first chair's customer. From behind a wall out sprung my hairdresser. "Are you scared?" he asked. "Noooo..." I was though. Not scared for my life, but rather scared for my dead hair that I didn't want to look as dead as he looked. He was a vampire. A self-professed one. All black, piercings in every place imaginable, arse grazing dreads, a buret that didn't quite fit and so many spikes that I feared possibly being stabbed in the eye.

The shampoo was the longest shampoo massage I had ever received at a salon and thought that maybe this wouldn't be as bad as I was anticipating. The chat in the chair showed my initial feelings were correct though. After multiple comments about S&M, talk about how exhausted he was from partying all week, and the several times he needed to take a break because he was getting "too hot and bothered" while drying my hair--my thin short hair mind you--all made me wonder if I had made the right choice to sit down and give this vampire guy a chance. He kept telling me I was "a white light" and that he felt I was "radiating sunshine" onto his dark soul. These were the only comments that seemed genuine...slightly uncomfortable for him, but genuine.This made me wonder if maybe he needed some light in his life that day and if I had to sacrifice my dead hair to give that to him, then maybe that was my day's purpose. Of course when he asked me out, I knew that my kindness wasn't going beyond this salon. "I think we're just very different people," I said. What else could I say? He's a vampire and I'm not in anyway trying to redo the Twilight saga.

When my hair was all blow dried and styled, it was obvious I didn't get the trim I had come in for. I looked like a wavy light brown haired Joan Jett. The Runaway's Joan Jett. Marshall the vampire's dream girl. All I could do was thank him, pay the fee at the front desk which was twice what Yelp quoted and leave. Sure I could be upset but in the grand scheme of things it's just hair. Dead hair that will grow back. Since my hair takes a ridiculous amount of time to grow back, I will just have to embrace it. The haircut and my inner seventies rockstar.

Dorothy Hamil (Ice skating sweetheart of the 1970's) and I share the bowl cut: