Charlotte Shane last shared her Liberal Dude Erotica with The Toast.
My hair has always been terrible, by which I mean curly. As a child, post-bathing, I’d howl while my mother angrily pulled a comb through my tangles, putting up such a piteous fuss that she had our hairdresser neighbor ambush me with a Shirley Temple haircut when I was 8. (I cried about that, too. Copiously, alone in an alcove outside the salon, establishing a pattern of public weeping that would persist well into adulthood.)
There has never been a time in my life when curly hair was trendy. I think it was tolerated into the mid ’80s, when I was a baby, and I grew up vaguely aware of the incomprehensible process that was perming, but as far as I’m concerned, curls have never been cool. I didn’t even have the long and thick kind that might be impressive and romantic instead of sad and puffy. My hair’s only claim to fame, which was revealed to me by my high school best friend, is that it was soft. So soft that the first time she touched it, she called her mom over to stroke it as well.
“I always thought it was just normal,” I said in the face of their awe. “It doesn’t feel that soft to me.”
“Charlotte,” my best friend said, “how soft do you think hair gets?”
Softness didn’t save my ringlets from earning me the nickname “Pubes” in high school. The first time someone said my head hair looked like pubic hair, I—an extremely literal young person—just looked back at them blankly because no, it really didn’t. Nor does it still. My hair has its faults, but you would never look at me from above and believe you were observing a massive crotch. Nonetheless, it became something of a term of endearment in my social circle. This detail came to light once when I doing stock in the back room of the GAP. (I’d been hired for the floor, but I loved doing stock, so occasionally, incredulously, they put me down for shifts there if I bugged them about it enough.) “If they call you that,” said the hippie stockroom manager, with complete sincerity and concern, “they’re not your real friends.”
I assumed my curliness precluded me from getting extensions, just as it precluded me from looking normal and being considered hot by the opposite sex, and from being called, say, “Legs” instead of “Pubes.” But one day when I was in my 20s, a woman blow-drying me at a random Brooklyn salon told me I would be an excellent candidate for extensions (because my hair was thin and shitty.) I was skeptical, but not so skeptical that hope could not establish a stranglehold on my heart. “I didn’t think you could get curly extensions,” I said. “Oh, you can,” she replied, a white woman in rainbow-dyed dreads. It was the beginning of the end for me.
I took this information to my colorist, a sexy but infuriatingly lackadaisical straight man, who affirmed it with his characteristic unconvincingness, probably after he kept me waiting for ten minutes while he snickered with a colleague in the corner about something on a cellphone. “Yeah, they get some curl to them after they’ve been shampooed a few times,” he said. Turns out he—who I’ll call Michael from now on, because that’s his real name, and I hate him*—was something of an expert on extensions. He’d even recently mastered a new brand with a much better method of attachment to the head than the revered Great Lengths bonding system.
This radically improved method was tape.
Apparently some tape-in hair extensions are about an inch wide but the kind Michael worked with, Platinum Seamless, were more like five if not six inches wide. Originally, while writing this, I couldn’t remember the brand name but after a few moments of pontificating, I recalled that Julia Allison had given them an endorsement and Google did the rest. If you have a minute, maybe grab a ruler and measure out five inches with your thumb and middle finger. Then hold that length up to your skull, and imagine having a massive hunk of hair glued in there. Natural, right?
You might not even be capable of picturing what I’m talking about right now, and I don’t blame you. Here’s the deal: the double-sided tape is like the filling of a sandwich, the bread of which is your own real hair. So you smack this sticky plastic piece near the roots of your real hair, and the (real) hair on top covers it. No one can tell you have taped another person’s hair into your head! No one except you, because Michael applies five of these shingles around your head in brick layer style, which means you can lift up parts of your hair like it’s the flap of a doggie door, those doggie doors are staggered, and you cannot gather all or even any of your hair above the base of your skull. Goodbye buns, hair clips positioned at the middle of your head, high ponytails, regular ponytails, and any semblance of a regular human life.
It doesn’t take a Mensa member to recognize this as an awful idea. While Michael talks about how safe and gentle and scientifically sound 6-inch tape extensions are, I watch the stick-straight clumps assume position against my scalp and a siren sounds in my head. It’s the “bad decision; abort” siren and it’s pretty distinctive. But above that siren is the sound of another, much louder siren. This is a siren I didn’t even know my brain possessed. It’s the “wow, much hair” siren, and it is less of a siren and more of a drooling, slack-jawed, masturbating man mesmerized at the two and half a feet of lock appearing where there once was only one, and a boner-killing curly one foot at that. The masturbating man somehow disables the legitimate alarm, in spite of having at least one hand already occupied.
Michael finishes placing the foreign hair into my familiar head. My skull has doubled in weight. He cuts some off, but together we conspire to leave at least 8 inches of alien growth hanging below my lame, real hair. He curls it some with a curling iron. I leave the salon $600 poorer and go to meet a client who booked us at an extremely nice spa.
My hair has exploded. It is a sexily curled mane with the heft of a rolled rug. It overwhelms every other aspect of my appearance. I look like a Victoria’s Secret model without a face. My client, a man I’ve met recently on at least three other occasions, apparently does not notice. I whisper to the massage therapist that under no circumstances can she touch my hair, and a scalp massage will be literally impossible. We somehow push it off to the side, since it can’t be clipped up. I lie there for the full 70 minutes thinking only of the luxurious piles of another human’s hair hanging off the edge of the table. When the client and I go up to the room and he amorously attempts to dig his fingers into my hair, he encounters the plastic head fence and says nothing. We roll around for a while and then I leave.
The next day, the horror sets in.
There was one problem with my extensions, which you may have already deduced: they were bad. They were entirely, obstinately, resolutely straight. They hung off my grown hair the way children make their bodies heavy when they’re resisting an adult moving them. Utter dead weight. Their pretense at having come from my own follicles was mocking at best. In color, texture, and shape they were nothing like my own. They were always vaguely sticky, staticky, almost fuzzy. In a word, they were wiggy. After showering, I awkwardly straightened what real hair I could access and then gave up.
But here’s the twist: my boyfriend loved me in my cheap extensions. Regardless of how artificial they looked, they still gave a decent first impression, and the straight male mind seems to cling to whatever imprint it originally receives. So I looked way hotter, all the time, and I often wore pigtails because I never knew what the hell else to do with it. Pigtails, we all know, are like a dog whistle for penises.
I couldn’t work without seeing a professional hair stylist first to get things in order, and the stress over how fundamentally bad I knew my hair looked (no matter what an unobservant man might think) was constant. Even professionals weren’t a reliable bet. One woman who’d never encountered tab extensions before took almost 90 minutes to give me a mediocre blowout. But eventually, I happened upon an angel in Vegas who gave me practical advice on how to use a massive-barreled curling iron to better blend the real and the fake. I met her just before a multi-day date with my sploshing client, which happened to take place near a beach. In other words, my frankenhair would be beset with much water, pudding, olive oil, and the like. After every wetting, it took me about an hour and the use of three different styling tools to wrangle my hair back into a not-totally-distractingly-terrible mess. My client was nonchalantly indulgent about my stretches of occupied time. Perhaps the women in his life always spent that long on their hair. But for me, in a few weeks I spent more time on my hair than I’d spent in the few decades of life I had under my belt.
Platinum Seamless would like you to believe that their hideous hair shingles will last up to three months with the proper care and love. I had mine evicted after six weeks—or, in other words, I paid at least $100 a week for the privilege of looking like man-pleasing junk and developing stomach ulcers from styling stress. And I had to go to a special salon to get them taken out, since salons get really twitchy about lawsuit- or arson-prone clients when it comes to handling extensions they didn’t install, and there was no way I’d ever let Michael touch my head again.
Of course I didn’t simply go back to life as an old-fashioned someone who grows her own. I’d tasted the toxic honey of long hair and I was not yet ready to quit eating. So I went to one of the most expensive salons in Manhattan and swapped my taped pieces for Great Lengths, the gold standard in hair extensionry.
Michael #2 was an extensioner to the stars. He and everyone else in the salon told me so. During the consultation, he called over a non-famous woman who’d been having something or other done—it seemed like the type of place where rich housewives went weekly just to kill time—and showed me her attachments. From first glance, this woman’s hair was blond, fine, flat, and unremarkable. It was cut an inch or so below her chin, so…not long. If you looked closer, you would see she had augmented this totally unremarkable look with extensions. “I’m known for making it look natural,” Michael #2 explained. I don’t know if that means he removed some of her hair and then added the fake stuff back in, or what. I should have bolted, but the man in my head was masturbating again. “Shut up! Get the hair!” he shouted, red-faced and sweating, sitting on the permanently broken “bad decision” alarm with his bare ass.
I forked over my 1k plus for my Great Lengths, and about three hours of my time in the chair of the mean, assistant-abusing stylist. The end result did not look great, nor did it add a lot of length, but it was far less alarmingly fake than my previous extend-job had been. If Platinum Seamless was the Hummer of hair extensions, Michael #2’s application of Great Lengths was a super expensive Hyundai. By which I mean, ok, but why bother? (Also, sorry for not knowing anything about cars.)
Great Lengths sort of improved my own hair but they also sort of didn’t, because it was still fucked up at the roots. You couldn’t comb it properly with anything, not even the wide toothed afro picks I’d been using for my own hair since I was a child. You were supposed to wear it in a ponytail while you slept but—curse my natural hair’s silkiness—it never stayed that way. It hurt to get them put it, and it stayed tender for a little while after. When clients put their hands into it, they definitely felt the tiny, numerous beads that mark attachment points where the stranger’s hair is fused to your own. (I don’t think they ever knew what it meant, and only one ever said something about it. Michael #2 told me he’d had a client for years who told her boyfriend the little knobs were the side effect of a special conditioning treatment she had regularly done to keep her hair healthy.) And it still wasn’t curly, so I kept working with my big-barreled iron from the Vegas angel to look presentable on a daily basis. I still relied on blowouts to look right for work; Great Lengths, at least, were much easier to manipulate for those who weren’t familiar with it.
Then a blow dry lady in Southern California told me my extensions were slipping. They were about an inch and a half from my scalp, which is much further than they should have been at that point in their life cycle, or so she thought. And they did seem to be less incognito than they’d previously been. Then one of them totally jumped ship during a blowout in Boston. I picked it up off the floor, mystified and slightly thrilled and slightly creeped out all at once, asking the blasé stylist, “Did this come from me?” No, Charlotte. Someone else was running around the salon near the chair you’d been sitting in, shedding entire locks of hair like healthy people do.
Before I left for my work date, I looked in the mirror and noticed one piece of hair hanging at least an inch below the rest. The attachment felt solid, so I used a pair of scissors to cut it level with the rest. Two days later, I noticed another extra long piece. This time I took hold of the end, applied gentle pressure, and it slid cleanly off. This started happening with some regularity. Sometimes I would grease the attachment point with oil, since it had usually fallen at least half way down the hair shaft and was visible and weird and not worth salvaging. Sometimes it resolutely clung to the strands and I’d have to give up and leave it where it was, albeit with a trim. But mostly, they came off. Maybe the fifth time this happened, I looked at the $20 piece of hair in my hand and realized something had to be done. Michael #2 had screwed me. Great Lengths really were supposed to last a long time, but mine were falling apart at barely a month in.
There was only one reasonable response. I needed new extensions.
The third time would be the charm, or so I resolved. Firstly, I was going to choose someone very near me, so I could stop by constantly if there was even the tiniest problem arose. This narrowed the field of candidates considerably since my neighborhood didn’t have a lot of Great Lengths technicians. (I was too afraid to go back to tape and Michael #2 had sealed that fear off with a nice sheen of snootiness when he sniffed, “I might use tab extensions for a photo shoot, if I were going to take them out later that day.”) But I finally located someone and I took her gender as an encouraging sign. My previous disasters had both been overseen by men, but never again!
I made the initial appointment and met Melina, with whom I instantly bonded—that’s an extension pun, by the way. Firstly, she had a dry sense of humor and relatively sedate personality, both of which I too can claim. Secondly, we spent all our time together talking about dumb boyfriends and great cats.
Melina concluded that Michael #2 had not secured my extensions close enough to my scalp, nor had he used large enough bundles of my own hair to join them to, and because my hair was both silky and shedding copiously, the extensions, like sweaty-handed rock wall climbers, lost their grip and slipped. He also hadn’t given me this “anti-tap” solution that was supposed to be used every time the hair got wet to protect the bonds. Her recommendation was that I get these extensions fully removed, wait 6-8 weeks to regrow some more of my own, and then do another full set. Like any addict, I was full of trepidation about the wait period, but I agreed.
The removal process was incredibly painful. I’m probably tender headed anyway, but it felt truly bad, almost as bad as watching the massive pile of discarded hair accumulate in a pile around my chair. And accumulate it did.
When I had my first set of extensions removed, I was pretty appalled by the natural growth left behind. I knew my hair was thin and shitty but had it always been that thin and that shitty? I chalked it up to extension gaslighting and assured myself it was a perception issue. My hair only seemed extraordinarily thin and fine because of the yards of mane that had briefly taken up residence there, right?
However, the skeletal real hair Melina revealed after her removal definitely confirmed what I’d been determined to deny: wearing extensions is a scorched earth policy of aggression against your own hair. Some stylists say things like “oh yeah, you can grow your hair longer while the extensions are in” as if somewhere, on some undiscovered planet, people are wearing extensions for three months and then taking them out to reveal even longer and more lustrous locks. Why, wearing extensions is practically the equivalent of a miraculous protein treatment only available to models and celebrities! Your hair will never be happier or healthier than after you’ve let a bunch of glued on chunks of other hair hang off you for half a year!
I looked like a 90-year-old crone on the verge of death. I could gather my hair in my palm and swirl it into the world’s saddest bird nest for a single robin’s egg. I could have spun my hair into one single, appetizer-size lollipop’s stick worth of cotton candy at one of those stupid trendy restaurants where cotton candy is supposed to be haute cuisine. I am not exaggerating. It was horrific. And I’m certain that whatever damage the extensions did on their own was generously exacerbated by the Hunger Games participant-level of stress I felt over managing those extensions: hiding them from everyone I shared my life with, keeping them on my head, explaining their weirdness to clients, worrying about how long they would last, if they would fall apart entirely while I was on a travel date, what they would leave in their wake.
You know what happened. I waited the absolutely bare minimum—6 weeks—and rushed back into the chair.
Melina’s extensions were better. And I threw myself into babying them like never before. But at this point, I knew I was trying to outrun the inevitable. “Why don’t you stop getting extensions,” friends, and possibly my mother, asked. They saw the emotional pain I was in, and they saw the atrocity that was my bare hair in those six weeks without extensions. “Fuck you, good friends and family,” the masturbating man said from inside my brain, but it was half-hearted. He was so raw and tired. We both were.
The weirdest thing to come out of the third experience was that Melina asked me to be her model during a local hair competition, and I said yes. She and another stylist did my makeup and of course my hair, and sent me out represent the height of human hair achievement. I did my part by acting like a mannequin only recently brought to life, my face paralyzed and my body awkward. In spite of my severe limitations at modeling, Melina almost won! But she was ultimately beaten out by another woman who, unfairly, seeded the audience with a larger base of friends and family, and they were the ones voting after the judges chose the final three.
If this were my E! True Hollywood Story, this would be the denouement where, having achieved the stardom I’ve dreamed of, I promptly succumb to a heroin addiction. Ok, so I, a hair outcast, almost won a hair competition, an honor beyond my wildest dreams. But at what price?
It was time to say goodbye to extensions, which I did with the mixture of fear and relief that marks many milestone life decisions. Now it was time to begin the work of growing my own hair, an occasion I rose to with the help of supplements, vitamins, Nioxin, hair masks, and Illuiwave. It was a very expensive and unsatisfying process. But now, when I visit my new stylist and new colorist and regular blowdryer—I do have some loyalty—they all exclaim about how much longer and thicker my hair is. It’s true, but sadly, all I can see, still, is the hair I want instead of the hair I have. On the bright side, my extension mania is forever a thing of the past and I stimulated the economy in my tragic, vain learning process. Perhaps even more brightly, I discovered and embraced Rogaine. I take the Men’s kind, because I’m a feminist, and because it’s sexist bullshit that it’s labeled by gender at all. Men’s Rogaine is stronger than Women’s Rogaine due to concern that full strength Rogaine will give women moustaches. Which it will, a little bit, but big deal. Plenty of us have moustaches anyway. And I have no shame about using it. My pigtail-loving boyfriend even knows about it; adorably, he calls it my “hair medicine.”
Rogaine, I’m convinced, is ultimately the only thing that really works if you want to improve the state of your natural hair. So take it from me, an almost hair champion with a shamefully checkered hair past. The $40 Rogaine investment is an infinitely wiser one than the $4,000 investment of getting awful hair extensions three times over. And if you’re determined to extend anything, do your eyelashes. They look amazing, no one can tell, and you can sleep while they’re being put in.
*Not really his real name. But I was so tempted.
Tags: beauty, charlotte shane, hair, suffering
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“They hung off my grown hair the way children make their bodies heavy when they’re resisting an adult moving them. Utter dead weight. ”
Dying. This whole thing is hilarious and I want to take it to the Red Robin for milkshakes.
As someone with genetically thin shitty hair who doesn’t want to do the Rogaine out of sheer stubbornness and who probably can’t do extensions (due to aforementioned thin shittyness), I am feeling you. I just went for the pixie myself, but I sometimes have dreams that I get a full sew in weave of waist length white blonde hair like Barbie and wake up…oddly disappointed.
This is great! Also I definitely never want hair extensions after reading this… The idea of pulling little clumps of hair off as they slip out of place is horrifying and absolutely something that would happen to me given how fine the stuff on my head is! Although it might be fun on a date, “Oh my god! What have you done to me!!”
A lot of ladies at my local gym have extensions, and it took a little while to stop having the initial moment of horror at seeing huge hunks of long black hair in the shower — and realize that nobody was murdered in the shower, it’s just hair extensions!
Apparently sweat and humidity does a number on them.
I once got three little bright red fake hair streaks put in my hair, and I remember vividly the day I ran my hand through my hair and one of them came away. I was talking to a customer at the time. It just slid out, with a couple of my old, dead hairs still attached, and we both stared at it as it fell to the floor.
This was really good – you are a very funny writer.
Oh my god, this sounds HORRIFIC. Oh lord. I’ve done a lot of stupid things in the name of beauty, but I don’t think I’d have the fortitude to allow people to glue or weave things into my hair without crying from the pain. (See: tender scalp.)
As it were I have the opposite problem, which is that my hair is so monstrously thick I have to regularly maneuver carefully with a flatiron or curling iron to calm it down lest it stick out in gigantic poofs on each side of my head like some kind of horrifying homemade turn-of-the-century doll baby. Holy shit, does having good quality tools make a difference!
As a fellow absurdly thick monster hair person, can I ask which quality tools you use? I have only just recently learned to tame my hair after nearly 30 years of constant ponytails, so I could certainly benefits from tips to make it easier.
I have a really nice GHD straightener that set me back about $100, which is my most-frequently-used tool. My hair stylist says she prefers something that doesn’t get as hot–it’s better for your hair to go over it twice with a 375-degree iron, for example, than once with a 500-degree iron, like another girl in the salon admitted to doing.
A big flat brush that I use for blowing out–a big, flat paddle brush with bristles helps a lot in blowing my hair out straight, which in turn cuts down on the time spent blowing and ironing in general. I know the fancy boar-bristle brushes are supposed to be better, but the regular bristle brushes seem to be fine for me.
For curling my hair, a decent-quality mid-range ($50 or so) curling iron with a nice big barrel. Mine is like 1.75″ or something. I don’t want to do tight curls, but this gives me “boost” and lift without creating ringlets, though I have to practice a LOT. Also I hear you can do this with hot rollers, but I am not proficient with those.
I completely forgot to respond to this yesterday, but thank you for the tips! I’ll have to check out the GHD straightener and a bigger curling iron– I had a feeling mine was too small.
SPLOSHING
RIGHT?! I learned a new thing today.
One of my good friends does it. I was all “what about yeast infections??” but she assured me that pros needn’t worry about such things. I admire her greatly.
An olive skinned child with dark curly hair, all I ever wanted was LONG (as in down to my bum), STRAIGHT, BLONDE hair. Oh how I wanted that princess hair!
Hair brings out ALL THE FEELINGS doesn’t it.
I guess the grass is always greener, because as person whose hair is pin straight, down to my elbows (and it used to be blonde, but it darkened to a middle brown as I got older), I have always wanted to have curly, dark brown hair.
I think the grass is definitely greener. Also, movie hair is so much prettier than real-life hair!
As a 40 year old woman who has mostly accepted her short, curly hair, I still want the long, gorgeous hair down to my butt. I finally have a fantastic hair stylist/salon that knows how to deal with curly hair, and she says that she can work with me to grow my curls out well (and she has fantastic hair!), so maybe my fantasy can finally come mostly true.
Where?! Who is this magic woman?!
I only go to stylists with natural curl. Not all of them have been great, but I figure anyone who embraces their own curl will be that much more likely to be able to help you embrace yours.
As someone with naturally fine, straight blond hair, all I ever wanted was perfectly curly black hair. Like Snow White (who’s also a princess!) or my mother. I was bitter for a long time that I hadn’t inherited her hair genes instead of my dad’s.
Many years later, I have a fwb with perfectly curly black hair, and it’s healing my pain little by little.
My sister had the princess hair. I had the “bad” hair, the kind that is curly, unruly, frizzy, fine, and flyaway, mostly because my mother disdained conditioner and used one of those straight haired people’s brushes on it in a severely misguided attempt to get it to lie down for once.
(sister did not really have the princess hair, as it is extremely thin in front and will not take to styling no matter what she does, but when I was a pre teen I sure thought she did because long, straight, and blonde)
Once upon a time I had a stylist, against his better judgment, bleach bright blonde streaks into my hair. They broke off within a week and left me with 1/4 inch long/wide stubby white patches on top of my head. SO PRETTY.
Thank you for this, because it is hilarious and also it validates the side-eye I give my stylist when she insists that extensions wouldn’t damage my hair at all. Lies!
oh god, I’m in a state of mild panic after reading this piece, brb, shaving head
This was extraordinarily stressful but completely relatable. We’ve all made beauty mistakes that have cost us, emotionally as well as financially (see: six sessions of laser hair removal for my underarms that did NOTHING). Someday someone will invent a product or machine that allows to have the exact amount and type of hair where we want it and nowhere else.
Since I was 6 years old I have known that my wish, if a genie popped out of a bottle and offered me one, would be that machine.
On my god, please tell me more. I’ve gotten fed up with the constant shaving/waxing/ingrown hair business and have been seriously thinking of giving laser hair removal a try. Educate me with anecdotes!
i did underarns and bikini, over like 6 lasers sessions. Underarm didn’t really accomplish much, but I’m happy with the bikini results! I swipe the area I want totally clear with a razor whenever (it was not a permanent 100% hairless result) with no ill results. It was maybe a 80% reduction in hair.
This was BEAUTIFUL, you are an EXCELLENT writer.
Wait, there are VITAMINS that make your hair grow faster? Clearly I have not delved into the correct Google searches.
I have heard pre-natal vitamins are supposed to give you INCREDIBLE hair. (Although buying them will mean you are bombarded with baby-themed merchandise offers, if Target’s marketing algorithms are anything to go by.)
I’m not certain, but perhaps that might be a confusion based on the fact that being pregnant does, in fact, give you incredible hair.
And then it all falls out post-partum as your hormones and body go to a new stasis. 🙁
boooooooooo
Honestly I can’t even care that much about my hair, these pregnancy boobs are so happening. (And this isn’t some male-gaze patriarchal beauty standards bullshit, I love these boobs for ME.)
for what it’s worth, I’ve been on BC since I was thirteen due to PCOS, and my hair is amazing because my body basically thinks I’ve been pregnant for fourteen years.
I’ve heard both prenatal vitamins and biotin supplements do insane things for your hair and nails.
My hairdresser swears by bamboo silica capsules!
Oh, god. Laugh-snorting so hard at work and trying to hide it, not succeeding very well. Dying, dead. I’m sorry everything about your extensions were so awful, but I’m so glad you could recount it to us in such a hilarious way. [wheezes]
This was so great, thank you! Your writing is hilarious.
I’m glad I don’t have more money or I would probably be tempted to do some crazy stuff in the name of beauty, too.
Oh, thank you for writing this. My own (bone straight, fine) hair is just starting to thin like my mother and grandmother’s hair before me and I have been waffling over what if anything to do about it. Tell me more, Toasties.
I have your hair. I went with long, fine, thinning hair to one of the most expensive salons here in Small Town, Texas. I asked the stylist what she would do with my hair if I gave her no guidance. She played with my hair and asked a few questions about how it responds to humidity, etc. Then she suggested a layered cut that would be no shorter than my chin. I said go for it. It was the best cut I have ever had.
Oooh, I’m gonna try this technique next time I get a haircut.
How long are your shortest layers? I have medium long hair (which I insisted on growing despite it not being very flattering, just so I could have long hair in my natural color one last time before I go gray and thin) and I’m open to the layered cut but I don’t want anything I can’t pull back.
To answer your question: my shortest layers are at 5 or 6 inches. I’d be OK with 3 or 4. Hell, I did wear spikes in my hair before my scalp became so noticeable.
Unsolicited opinion: pulling hair back is one of the best ways to show more scalp, show how sparse your hair is.
I’m sure you did get my point, though. 1) Let go and TRUST an expert to have great ideas that suit your natural hair. 2) ACCEPT any outcome with this great stylist. 3) REMEMBER that hair grows and you are never stuck with any cut or color. You have nothing to lose and so much to gain. Good luck and best wishes.
Forgot to add, I am not trying to hide my scalp or the fact that I have lost so much hair. That helps. It may be essential. Took me a couple years to achieve this bit of serenity.
I went pixie, and pull all the crown hair forward to make bangs, which also disguises the thinning patch up front.
1. Pixie if you can (or chin lengthish bob things). Only if you like short hair; I understand it is not everyone’s cup of tea. Layers! Done by a stylist who knows his/her shit and has worked with thin hair. Cutting it makes a huge, huge, huge difference. For me it was not just in looks but also psychologically (because big long hairs weren’t sliding off my shoulders all day).
2. Highlights. FO REAL. I don’t know why this works as well as it does. Imaginary depth due to color variance? Damage caused by bleach thickening the strands? WIZARDS?
3. Thickening goo (I’ve used a ton, I swear they are all the same. Just you know…some goo. I’m using something by Tigi right now that’s purple, but honestly it’s all goo).
4. VIRGIN BLOOD (applied or ingested)*
5. Protein treatments like, uh…once a week or something.
6. Lightweight hairspray if you are a styled hair person. I used Elnett back when I thought I was the King of Siam, but have downsized to Suave Touchable finish which smells like strawberries, strangely. Regular hairspray makes it floop down sadly (a cross between a flop and a droop, you know it when you see it).
Anyway, no one but me can tell mine is thin/thinning. It began thinning when it was long and auburn, which made it painfully obvious. Now people call me mad when I say my hair is thinning. MAD, I tell you!
*KIDDING, don’t murder anyone! But if you do and it helps, let me know.
Is the virgin blood the protein treatment, or…….?
You know, it can be used SO many ways. It’s like coconut oil.
I know the floop so well. So, so well.
Do born-again virgins count, because I have a cousin who been re-virginized several times and could probably be convinced to repent again…?
Born-agains are best sacrificed. Always.
No No No… Please I had the same experience. My hair ended up like the most pathetic tiny ponytail that I had to wrap the tie around 6 times. I screamed at my husband crying I’m bald. Then I told him”statistics say Woman continplate committing suicide 49% of the time when they go bald”….He had no clue what to say. I just hope mine grows back. I wish someone would tell me it will grow back
Charlotte I invoked your tale of extensions at dinner last month and now my friend and I have agreed to never ever cut our hair no matter what fun ideas our stylists have. I thank you for liberating me!
Just reading about maintaining extensions (and the stress involved) makes me anxious.
One of the best things about getting older is that the masturbating man in my head (brilliant, that is such a brilliant and apt image!!) doesn’t pull any levers, doesn’t have a loud voice, doesn’t even get a VOTE anymore. I mean, the fucker is still there in a dark corner of my head, and occasionally mutters darkly about my choice to wear flats or get a chin-length haircut. I just roll my eyes, don one of my Office Caftans, and proceed to ignore him for weeks on end.
Also lol-ing at how GoogleAds has decided that “100% premium human hair extensions! Only $39!” is a good fit for this article.
I am seriously in the market for Office Caftans. Share your secrets with me.
Please do tell us where you acquire your office caftans!
For those seeking what I call my “Office Caftans” (I’m wearing one right now! er… at the office … on my “break”), I recommend kimono-sleeve dresses from Sou Sou. They are pricey, but I absolutely live in mine — home, office, travel (they are seriously the BEST for air travel).
Kimono-grade wool: http://www.sousouus.com/product-category/women-ap…
Cotton: http://www.sousouus.com/product-category/women-ap…
They also have a variety of short-sleeved dresses that could be worn as is or layered. Sou Sou is known for absolutely gorgeous high-quality fabrics, and everything they make drapes so beautifully. I have been slowly accumulating dresses (and other outfit elements) from them for a while, whenever I can afford it, and I adore everything I get from them. I get so many compliments on my Office Caftans!
Oh! I should also mention the San Francisco store has excellent customer service. If you don’t see a fabric you like in their stock, they will order stock from Japan. The Kyoto shop doesn’t seem to stock the wool kimono-sleeve dresses in the summer season, but you can see their cotton dresses (http://sousounetshop.jp/?mode=cate&cbid=482404&csid=251) and short-sleeve wool dresses (http://sousounetshop.jp/?mode=cate&cbid=482404&csid=213) and send the SF store a link to see if they can order one.
(…I swear I do not work for these people, although they are wlecome to send me free stuff any time! I just love their clothes.)
Thank you for sharing, these are lovely. And they have pockets!
The MM in my head keeps telling me to dye my hair red again. NO. I spent three years with bad grow out roots to get my skunky striped grey and brown hair to be all the same shades all the way from root to tip, and I am not going through that again, especially not the part where I can’t afford a regular colorist so end up with weirdly graduating boxed color hair that is dry as hell and breaks off when the wind blows. Do you hear me, MM? No more. I don’t care how old I look being more than half grey at 43.
This was such a joy to read.
I have thick, soft, wavy hair that will grow down to my butt if I let it. It is it the envy of all. I shave my head weekly.
EAT SHIT, MASTURBATING MAN IN MY HEAD
This comment is the best because you sound like you’re about to be Typical YA heroine until you suddenly reveal your amazingness. It made me chortle like the fishwife I am.
Did anyone else picture the masturbating man in her head as Louis C.K?
Now, I do!
Oh Julia Allison. I still read reblogging donk. She is such a loon and how now reinvented herself yet again, this time as an anti-consumerist “experience seeker”
.Ok! Time to share our horrifying/baffling playground nicknames.
I have long curly/frizzy hair, so I got called Howard Stern for a while.
And then there was this weird twin who always took off his socks to make sock puppets when we were forced into group work together, and his smelly gross sock puppets would call me “bogey” and then BECOME bogey/me and crash with rocket sounds.
I still don’t get that one, by the way.
My hair earned me the lovely nickname “Shredded Wheat” one year. And my older sister nicknamed younger sis & me “Frizzle & Kinks,” though she never revealed which one of us was which.
I got the standard Shirley Temple nicknames as a little kid, and about a year ago this horrifying racist lady on the subway decided to pause in her rant about dirty Mexicans to tell me that if I would just slap on some lipstick I would look just like Taylor Swift (n.b this is false, but La Swift and I both have curly hair, so).
I have never forgiven my high school history teacher for describing my hair as frizzy directly to my face. I very carefully did not pull an Anne Shirley/it’s-not-red-it’s-auburn and say, “It’s not frizzy, it’s curly!” but I was sorely tempted.
I was called “Greenie” by a group of mean girls in 8th grade because I attempted to put gold highlights in my hair. They tried really hard to make that stick, but apparently nobody really thought it was worth being a thing.
My actual friends were not mean and were impressed at how soft my hair was after I colored it.
This was a great read, funny and totally relatable. My favorite line by far was “Pigtails, we all know, are like a dog whistle for penises.” I laughed out loud here at my desk.
As for tips, the best thing I’ve found for my previously thick, now thinning hair is prenatal vitamins. My hair and nails grow so fast and healthy during times I remember to take them regularly. The only catch is that if you color your hair like I do, the fast growth means you have to cover your roots more often.
The is the funniest and the best.
Also, I’m now getting sidebar ads for clip-in hair extensions here on the Toast, so that’s a thing.
Loved this.
I spent far too much time as a teenager reading the forums at naturallycurly.com, and so my first instinct is to shout, “BUT IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY, FELLOW CURLY!!!” exactly like a sixteen year old who has just read The Second Sex for the first time and wants to explain all about Feminism.
That masturbating man is the worst, isn’t he? In my head he looks like Ricky Gervais.
Ok, since there’s been some hair advice here, I will seek my own! I have so much hair. It’s really thick, mostly straight, goes down a little past my shoulders, and now that it’s hot, I am losing my mind, and also it’s a funny shape, all the time. I wouldn’t mind having super short hair (take THAT, masturbating man!), but I don’t think I’d want it short forever and am dreading the inevitable awkward mullet phase of growing it out again and also the uncomfortable intermediate stage where I can’t put it up when I play sports. What kind of haircut can I try to get? How do you give hairdressers helpful guidance? Or, give me words of encouragement to say fuck you to the masturbating man and get a short cut! (And then what kind, ahh.) My hair is nice, but I am bad at hair and don’t know what to do with it.
I am currently moving from the mullet stage to the intermediate stage, and it really hasn’t been all that bad. Especially since The Toast revealed to me that it can be put up in tiny pigtails way before it’s long enough for anything else.
If the sports in question are non-contact and don’t require headgear, then I think tiny pigtails plus a couple bobby pins would work pretty much as soon as it was long enough to be annoying. Or if the sports are seasonal, you could start growing it out at the end of the season and assume that it would be long enough to corral somehow by the start of next year’s season.
Tiny pigtails!!! What a good idea, thanks.
I have approximately your hair texture, have worn a pixie cut for years, and I LOVE it. The key words of hairdresser guidance are “You can really cut into it; it’s okay.” For growing it out, apparently the secret is to keep cutting the back and sides until the top part catches up (I base this on looking at photos of Anne Hathaway after the Les Mis movie).
Also had a bob (chin length) for quite a while and enjoyed that, but it required more styling (round brush + blow-dryer or flatiron).
Hmmm, noted! Glad to hear of pixie success. Hairdressers sometimes pause halfway through my hair, look up in surprise, and say something like, “there’s still so MUCH of it!” Yes, good job. The trimming of the back and sides sounds like a good approach, too.
Yeah, I too have found cutting the back regularly as it grows out is key to not hating your hair.
Random tangent: I see that you translate your username as “unfortunately, trousers” but in my head it’s “sorry pants” as in, “Got my sorry pants on, ready to get really bummed out today!” And then my coworkers stare at me while I giggle into my coffee cup.
AHAHA, that is most excellent, I’m so glad that’s how you read it in your head. The joke for me, beyond the obvious leider/leder thing, is that I hate wearing pants so much, so they’re always unfortunately pants. But “sorry pants,” another stellar interpretation, I will have to bring it into conversation. 🙂
i considered full head extensions a few years ago, but ultimately decided against them cause i am cheap and also i am cheap. now i am glad i did!
as a trans person tho i have spent mumbledy thousand dollars having my beard removed so like, i cannot endorse your position on moustaches.
I had icky fine straight hair that refused to hold a clip, bobby pin, hair slide, perm, anything. (Well, I did crimp it once with fairly good results for, like, an hour or two)
But after that 2nd baby, it got all wavy & full for no apparent reason. Thanks, 2nd baby!
ANYWAY, this was hilarious and eye-opening and rather more terrifying than anything else I’ve heard about extensions. Thanks!
Oh, I feel your pain! I’ve got fairly thin, curly hair too (and yes, it’s soft as well), and how I want pretty, long hair! I’ve realised that I just won’t ever get it (and wow, after this story, there’s no way I’m going to get extensions) and also, I am lazy, so I guess I’m just going to have to learn to live with it.
Oh, and I got teased about the pube-hair too. And they weren’t my real friends either.
Great piece 🙂
Oh, I feel your pain! I've got fairly thin, curly hair too (and yes, it's soft as well), and how I want pretty, long hair! I've realised that I just won't ever get it (and wow, after this story, there's no way I'm going to get extensions) and also, I am lazy, so I guess I'm just going to have to learn to live with it.
Oh, and I got teased about the pube-hair too. And they weren't my real friends either.
Great piece 🙂
GO TO A SPECIAL HAIR SALON FOR CURLY HAIR! It was literally the first time in my life I had ever had a good hair cut.
I laughed, hideously, joyfully, and with great sympathy, through all of this. Thank you.
‘“I didn’t think you could get curly extensions,” I said. “Oh, you can,” she replied, a white woman in rainbow-dyed dreads. It was the beginning of the end for me.’
omg. Last year I decided to crop my hair, and chose a salon which had a rainbow sticker in the window and gender neutral pricing. My haircut was amazing. In the subsequent months, however, the particularly progressive stylist left the salon and they made her take the rainbow sticker out of the window. They also put the prices up for ladies’ cuts and brought in a new stylist who was a white lady specialising in white person dreadlocks. I… yeah.
I literally have to use thinning shears on my hair every time I get it cut, so I have difficulty imagining wanting to add MORE hair to my head.
“Pigtails, we all know, are like a dog whistle for penises” I lost my coffee when I read this. Super funny well written article and I don’t think any hair extensions look as good as the real thing
Kathy
The Flat Iron Queen
Wonderful. I am a hair extension technician and STILL love this article. This probably sums up 99% of all hair extension experiences!
Thank you.
Great writing. I’ve had a very similar experience. I stumbled upon this article after Googling “Shitty waftey thin hair after tape in extensions HELP”. Sums up my experience. Thankfully, I’m only $600 in the hole.
Wow! I almost fell over from laughter when I read this: “I looked like a 90-year-old crone on the verge of death. I could gather my hair in my palm and swirl it into the world’s saddest bird nest for a single robin’s egg.” Hehe… I’ll definitely be sharing this one with some of my friends – a lot of them do hair extensions…
Lisa
<a href=”http://www.kinkycurlyweavehair.org” target=”_blank”>www.kinkycurlyweavehair.org
Karmin Easy Clips makes the best extensions in my opinion
This made me feel so much better. I'm in the midst of a hair faux-pas with these tape ins and was in need of a pick me up. Despite how difficult letting them go in exchange for my measly au-natural look will be, I know it is the right decision. Your article has hit the nail on the head!