A date with Sarah-Kate; Kate’s home truths

Sarah-Kate gets herself in a surprising frizz tizz

Iwonder how old you have to be before you really truly believe that the grass is not greener on the other side of the fence. Like, 100? I’m halfway there and no nearer to clocking it than I ever was.

All my life I have looked at girls with long, sleek, shiny ponytails and wished I had hair like that. Straight, glossy hair that swings across your back like a curtain when you walk. Smooth, chic hair that can be twisted in the blink of an eye up into an elegant chignon. Silky, lustrous hair that I might pull into a faux messy top knot with somehow still not a tress out of place.

But alas, the hair gods did not bless me in this way. When they called out, “Who wants frizz?”, I thought they said “fizz” and, imagining a lifetime of champagne, joined the wrong queue.

Ever since, I’ve been investing in lotions and potions to soothe my fuzzy ’do into something resembling an elegant chignon’s distant cousin brought up by wolves in the Amazon – with little success.

Then, recently, a hairdresser I know suggested she give me a smoothing treatment. Oooh, yes please! She put goop on my hair, ironed it, then blow-dried it so that although I had forgotten to grow it long, it still was straight and silky. How I loved it!

Unfortunately, she lives in Australia and I do not. And the first time I washed my hair and tried to do it myself, I could not recapture the stylish silhouette she had created. I could not capture anything.

“Lank” is the word that springs to mind and it is not a good word. Yes, I had the straightness, but I had no volume. And it turns out I need volume. I need it a lot. Without it, my hair sat sadly on the top of my head and dripped down the sides, making me look for all the world like Wednesday from the Addams Family, which is not what I am going for.

You guessed it. I missed the frizz. On the minus side, frizz gives you a furry outline and makes it look like someone threw a toaster in the bath mid-shampoo. On the plus side, it lifts your hair from your scalp and breathes a bit of life into it. Who knew?

Next minute, I’m out there looking for products that might bring my frizz back. But in a cruel twist, there aren’t any. Turns out I might be the only person in the world who really truly wants it.

So, in the absence of being able to convince my hairdresser friend to relocate to my house for a daily blow-dry (my obvious preference), I’m left with the age-old growing-it-out scenario.

I’ve been here before – once when I let my Wellington flatmates give me half a pixie cut back in the ’80s and again when I let my London flatmates loose with a blonde dye bottle a few years later. I told you I was a slow learner.

This time, surely, I have learned my lesson.