YES, you CAN look 10YEARS younger in three hours
You’ve had more than 100 bad hair days and now salons are finally open! Four writers show you how to make the VERY most of your longed-for appointment...
When someone tweeted at the beginning of all this, would you like to selfisolate with A. Your husband or B. Your hairdresser, I was one of many who ticked B without hesitation.
Given I ended up in the West Country with A, I haven’t had a good hair day since early March. Something about Somerset turns it into a woolly mop. (My friend Fiona calls it ‘sheepy’.) By April I had gone full Planet Of The Apes. My cockapoo puppy has had more grooming than me — I hand-shampoo her in the sink and blow dry her fluffy white curls. I usually go to the salon once a week to tame the shag into Rachel-from-Friends sleekness. But that has not been possible.
Yes, I know you have to take the rough with the smooth in a pandemic, but I want straight shiny hair again, and I want it three months ago.
So as soon as my brother Boris gave the green light, I was on Zoom to top hairby
dresser Paul Edmonds. He contemplated me without speaking as I whined, ‘I look like Dougal in The Magic Roundabout! The sides and top are too heavy.’
He did not disagree. ‘You need more sex put into it,’ he advised. (If only!) Then Joe the colourist chipped in: ‘It’s very blonde, but a bit samey, I’d like to break it up and give some depth with some honey blonde streaks,’ he said.
So this weekend I went to his South London salon to see if Paul could, in his words, ‘banish Dougal and bring back sex kitten’.
The whole salon has been made Covid- secure at vast effort and expense, and everyone was gowned and masked to the nines.
The Golden Fleece was washed and then Paul snipped into the heavy bob and shaped the back before Joe the colourist striped some light streaks to tone down, yet brighten, the lurid yellow shade I’d developed, like a photograph, from three months ‘romping’ on Exmoor in the sun.
I sat in a mask with my hair draped in cling film with a PPE gown on and the photographer raised his lens. ‘ Not now!’ I snapped. It was only after Paul ( pictured) had given me a blow- dry and tousled my newly sunshiny hair with his fingers and I’d tousled it once more myself that I allowed the new look to be photographed.
Paul took barely an inch off but I felt as if I had returned to the world after hibernation.
It’s definitely not sex kitten (we leave that to Brigitte Bardot), but it’s not Dougal either. And I left thrilled I no longer look like an extra in 100 Days Later — that soon-to-be-made horror about the impact three and a half months of lockdown can have on the female appearance.