So should YOU have HAIR HOLIDAY?
For decades, Mail writer AMANDA PLATELL hid the curls she hated with this super-sleek look. This summer, she dared to go natural (and saved a LOT of time). Here she tells how her horror turned to joy...
ACOUPLE of weeks ago I was booked by a TV station to do their 6.15am politics slot. Top of the agenda was the row between Barack Obama and Donald Trump over the shootings in Texas and Ohio, with Obama blaming Trump and the President hitting back that there had been 32 massacres ‘on his watch’.
It was a sombre subject that I had spent some hours researching.
Normally for such a job I would be up around 3.15am to be ready to be collected by a cab about 5am, having factored in a quick shower and coffee, time to do my make-up and the 45 long and boring minutes it would take to blow-dry my hair straight, a ritual I have performed most days for more than 20 years — although mercifully, not usually at that hour.
As I headed for bed the night before, the very thought of that lonely hour the next morning, with just me and the hairdryer, up earlier than the sparrows, spent not sleeping but straightening, made me feel exhausted — and rebellious.
‘Damn it,’ I thought. ‘I will be a slave to my hairdryer no more.’ So I chose to have the extra 45 minutes’ sleep and present myself at the TV studio as nature intended.
Truth be told, I had been on what I call my ‘hair holiday’ for more than a month already.
At the beginning of July I had hung up my hairdryer like a weary gunslinger hangs up his six-shooter.
My bid for freedom began one afternoon when my hairdresser, and friend, Kerry, rang me. ‘I can’t chat,’ I told him, ‘I’ve got to blow-dry my hair for a dinner date this evening.’
‘Oh just go natural,’ he said. ‘Your hair is fabulous.’
And just like that, I thought — why not?
I had begun to view styling my hair as a cumbersome hurdle I had to get over, so what did I really have to lose?
THAT first evening, I’ll admit I didn’t look great. Kerry had warned me that my hair would need to readjust to it’s natural curly state, but over time it would recalibrate, in much the same way muscle memory works. It didn’t help that my date for the evening, who was also an ex-boyfriend, asked if I had let myself go!
But I persevered, and by the time of that TV booking, Kerry’s prediction had come true, I’d received positive feedback from friends and I was beginning to feel confident in the new curly me.
Nevertheless, I didn’t sleep easily. I knew it would mean arriving at the TV studio not as the power-dressed Mail writer they were expecting, but a woman of a certain age (I’m 61) who looked like she’d just got out of bed, slapped on some lipstick and bundled herself into a car –which is exactly what I intended to do.
The reaction was surprising. Walking onto the set before we began recording, presenter Kate Garraway cried: ‘Amanda, your curls! I’m loving them. Who did that for you?’
‘God did,’ I replied, explaining how my hair is not really lovely, smooth, glossy and wavy as I have presented to the world for decades but actually a tangled nest of corkscrew curls.
Kate immediately confessed that she too had fractious hair but wouldn’t dare leave the house without taming it.
Even more surprising was that instead of starting the Obama vs Trump item live on
breakfast TV, Kate began saying: ‘Amanda, first we have to talk about your hair!’
Yes I know this not an issue occupying world leaders at the G7 Summit, but while Kate and I discussed, at length and on air, curly versus straight hair, my curls momentarily trumped Trump!
Forget equal pay, glass ceilings and maternity rights, nothing unites women like hair. It is the key to our looks, what we perceive as our attractiveness, our assertiveness, our authority, the externalisation of our confidence and our place in the world.
Would the Celtic Queen Boudicca with her flaming red tresses have led an uprising against the Romans if she was bald as a bandicoot?
Cleopatra, Elizabeth I and Princess Diana – the memorable women of power and influence have always had great hair (or in the case of Queen Elizabeth, a great wig). Yet today when you turn on the TV there is hardly a woman who is not a straight-haired slave to her hairdryer.
Emily Maitlis, Claudia Winkleman, Fiona Bruce, Susanna Reid, Kay Burley. All smooth as manufactured silk.
Such is Newsnight presenter Emily’s devotion to straight hair that, with military precision, she employs a former Albanian general to bike round to her house three times a week to blow-dry her hair into a sleek bob. Channel Four’s Cathy Newman is a rare exception.
And before men start moaning about how trivial women’s obsession with our hair is, let’s start counting the times they obsess about their own locks – usually the rapid recession of it. They, like us, see it as a primal indicator of sexuality and attractiveness. In their cases, also their virility.
Most men when their pates recede don’t look like Bruce Willis, they look like Wayne Rooney. Crikey, even David Beckham worries about his hairline.
The other reason why I decided to appear on national TV looking like I’d been gently dragged through a hedge backwards was that I totted up how much time my hair maintenance had consumed.
A home blow-dry takes me 45 minutes, three times a week, with several ten-minute topups between when the dastardly curls begin to reappear. That’s about three hours a week or 156 hours a year.
Multiply that by the 20 years I’ve been killing my curls and it adds up to about 130 days, which is around four-and-ahalf months.
Given we sleep a third of the day, that means I’ve wasted nearly half a year of my precious life blow-drying my hair.
That spurred me on, thinking of all the lovely things I would do with my extra three hours a week – sleep in half an hour a day, stay out late at night, watch an entire box set, volunteer in the local charity shop, go walking, get a dog to have someone to walk with?
I wasn’t born with these curls. As a child I had straight, jet black hair but puberty wreaked its own particular revenge. Suddenly there were curls coming out of nowhere, then there was frizz.
Back in the 70s when I was a teenager my emerging fuzz was more embarrassing than a young boy’s pre-pubescent moustache.
The fashion then was for poker straight hair and long curtains down the side of your face. I was a hair alien and felt more like a gorilla than a girl.
So in an act of rebellion I grew it down to my waist, the heavy weight the only way to control the chaos of curls.
Then, years later, one day a man at university I knew vaguely and liked immensely said over a coffee that the thing he liked most about
me was my hair. I asked why.
He said because it looked as though I’d just got out of bed — in the afternoon.
I wish now I’d held onto that thought and not succumbed to the tyranny of fashion and fakery, that my hairdryer had not become my best friend.
Two months in to my Hair Holiday, I can hardly say it’s been a summer of love. I still feel ridiculously undressed when I step out of the house, lacking in gravitas (if ever I had it) especially when doing my job.
I realise now that my hair was my armour. It protected me from the world. Without the trusty blow-dry, you feel vulnerable.
Imagine Kim Kardashian or Meghan Markle even venturing out without a Brazilian chemical straightener and a poker straight blow-dry. Unthinkable!
For me that’s like turning up for a political discussion show in a pair of shorts to discuss Brexit— you feel absurdly underdressed and underwhelming. Friends and colleagues have taken some time getting used to the natural me, too.
FIRST there’s the surprised look on their faces when they first see me. Some are genuinely delighted and say it looks fabulous — or perhaps I’m just kidding myself.
Others offer up a ‘you look nice’ accompanied by a bewildered look which is, as we women know, the most damning thing they can say. We’d prefer they were just honest and said they hated it.
Or, then there’s reactions like the one a long-time friend gave when I walked past him in the street.
First he didn’t even recognise me and I had to take off my sunglasses to convince him saying: ‘It’s me, it’s Amanda.’
After stumbling around for something ‘nice’ to say he thene blurted out: ‘You look like Shakespeare’s Ophelia.’
‘Thanks,’ I replied, ‘that’ll be
Hamlet’s tragic heroine who falls into a stream and drowns.’ ‘No, no, before she drowns, you look like Ophelia before she drowns.’ At least he was honest when messaging me some hours later: ‘On second thoughts, maybe I was thinking of Medusa.’ The ultimate test of my Hair Holiday came a few weeks ago when I set off on an actual holiday in the South of France with a group of friends. I met up very early at the airport with one of them, both of us bleary-eyed through lack of sleep. She looked at my curls and said she’d been joking with her husband that I’d have been up at 2am blowdrying my hair – as she had. ‘Look at the state of you!’ she laughed, pointing at my head. I was channelling Minnie Driver but admit I had almost achieved Bette Midler on a bad hair day. Well, I had the last laugh. While she was swimming with her head above the water in the pool in our villa so as not to let the water destroy her blow-dry, I was diving through the water like a dolphin, emerging with long, wet sausage-sized curls. But of course, I couldn’t let nature take over completely. There are products out there for even the most ‘undone’ do. I’m a fan of Kerastase curly hair shampoo and conditioner, and I’m gradually acquiring quite a collection of other lotions and potions: L’Oreal Hollywood Waves or Dual Stylers, Kerastase Oleo Curl Cream and a brand of spray called Milk Shakes. After shampooing I work any of the above products though my hair, preferably with my head upside down, massaging them through especially at the ends. I’m still experimenting to find the best combination for my curls – it’s a work in progress. And a tip from my friend Kerry: don’t use a regular towel as it fluffs up the hair, but a super absorbent hair towel or just plain paper kitchen towel to soak up the excess moisture. And a diffuser, the big, bulbous thing you put on the end of the hairdryer if you’re in a hurry and can’t wait for it to dry naturally before you leave the house. It takes five to ten minutes maximum. Head upside down, a bit of scrunching the ends and you’re out of there. Now the evenings are drawing in, the holidays nearly over. Will I return to my armourplated hair come September when the political conferences begin and the battle for Brexit really starts? Who knows, but as that gorgeous song from the musical Grease goes: ‘Oh those summer nights.’