WOULD YOU PAY £2,000 FOR PERFECT HAIR? Because that means a lot less to spend in Zara
Josie Copson spent a lifetime faking it (badly) in her quest for longer locks. Here, she recounts her road to extension nirvana ›
Iremember the day I got my hair cut the way most people remember the day their family pet died. I was 13. Days earlier, my older sister Abbi had said, “You know, you’ve got the perfect face shape for a bob,” while absent-mindedly flicking through a copy of Heat magazine. Sibling coercion is a powerful thing. I mulled it over for all of two minutes, then insisted my mum booked me in for a cut and blow-dry at the hairdressers above our local gym. The minute she left, I instructed the hairdresser to cut the lot off. To understand what followed, you need to know what came before. I had lovely hair. It was long, shiny as a horse chestnut and reached that teeny little nook in the small of my back. My long hair was a part of my identity but, of course, I didn’t realise this until it was gone.
Ten minutes later, there it was – chocolate tendrils scattered across the floor of the hairdresser’s whitetiled floor like shrapnel. I now had a bob. But this was no VictoriaBeckham bob. It wasn’t even a vaguely hipsterish Velma from Scooby-Doo bob. This was a bob of epic proportions, a bob that floated around my head like giant cumulonimbus clouds.
I waited eagerly for my mum in the gym reception, hopeful of some reassurance. It never came. She looked at me and said,“Cute,” which sounded far more like a question than a statement. My hair never grew back.
I was now saddled with braces, acne and a malfunctioning bob. It wasn’t an easy time. The boys at school called me ‘Mushroom.’ My boyfriend dumped me. At the exact moment girls in my class were emerging from their adolescent chrysalises as beautiful, elegant butterflies, I was Ann Widdecombe.
Two years and about one inch of hair growth later, despite trying every supplement, treatment and piece of advice available to womankind, I had no choice but to fake it.
(VERY CHEAP) GLUE-INS
My mum has Afro hair, so that means I spent many, many hours of my childhood in Caribbean hair salons. One of the few benefits of this (besides the fact that I got a magazine and a Morrisons hot-counter chicken drumstick) was that I learned what you could achieve with some fake hair and very cheap glue. Armed with this knowledge, I found a hair-extension stockist on Brierley Hill high street and got myself a bag of hair and a bottle of black hair glue. I then returned to my hairdresser with my two bags and asked them to get to work. Two hours later, I emerged looking like Katie Price. Who cares that my entire head smelt of mackerel (that glue is potent stuff)? Or that the jet-black extensions looked like they had been liberated from Alice Cooper? I had long, swishy hair again. I felt like me.
CLIP-INS
The thing is, there’s only so long a girl can put up with her entire head smelling like a fish supper. And besides, my real hair was matting at the roots, the glue was dripping out and I’d spend my life finding little tails of hair all over the place. Often I couldn’t afford to go back to the salon to get them reapplied (you try and afford hair-extension upkeep when you’re earning £10 a week teaching primaryschool children maths, and £5 for doing the entire family’s ironing), so I would glue them back in myself. The results included, though were not limited to: black hair glue over my entire wardrobe, thick globules of hastily applied glue all over my hair, and one carpet stain in my sister’s bedroom that we still do not talk about. Thankfully salvation came from the most unlikely of places: TOWIE. I’d heard Lauren Pope (her of the lustrous hair and Lilo lips) was flogging hair extensions that you could attach temporarily with clips. They seemed the perfect solution – until I applied them. They were heavier than your average extension – so heavy, in fact, that my poor natural hair struggled with the weight and would break off in fine
little wisps. There was also the comedic sight of me having to hang my hair over my laundry basket every evening, bringing to mind the Dolly Parton quote: “Home is anywhere I hang my hair.” Still, my clip-ins took me all the way to university where I became adept at removing them mid-marathon-make-out sessions.
MICROBEADS
Oh, these sounded so good! At least, according to their website. Teeny plastic beads that required no heat, no glue, and which attached delicate strands of extensions to my own rapidly diminishing head of hair. My mum insisted on doing it by following a YouTube tutorial in a bid to cut costs (at £200 per application, you can see why). She is a woman so heavyhanded that she once broke the door off our washing machine simply by opening it, so you can imagine what my scalp had to go through as she put the extension inside a bead in my real hair, then used dad’s pliers to secure it. A year later, I had two bald patches.
TAPE-INS
Imagine Sellotape, but for your hair. That is tape-ins. Literally. The first time I went to get them done, the hairdresser grabbed a piece of what little hair she could find, put a piece of tape below it and a piece of tape above it and then patted it down like two pieces of Warburtons bread over a slice of ham. The tapes were longer and lighter than the beads, which meant less pressure on my real hair. In truth, the ‘tape years’ were pretty good to me and my hair. My own remaining tendrils certainly preferred them. The only issue was they tended to fall out the closer I got to maintenance day – seriously, just running my hands through my hair would result in a mass exodus of extensions. I could be mid-conversation with someone and the next minute I would be talking with a fistful of my own hair in my hand (is that called a ‘power move’?). In the end, I took to keeping an envelope in my handbag where I could safely store any errant extensions to be reused on my next salon visit. At one point I had more hair in my handbag than I did on my head. Something had to change.
MICRO RINGS
I’ll admit. I was dubious. For a start, micro rings sound like some odd variation on the vibrating cock ring. But I was told on good authority that these are the gold standard of hair extensions. I headed to Vixen & Blush, a salon in London where ›
the staff are all specially trained in hair extensions, rather than being hairdressers with an extension side hustle (or my mum and a pair of pliers from dad’s toolkit). Micro rings are basically little copper tubes that flatten when they’re applied so you can barely see anything – although you do have to wave goodbye to the high pony. They’re less weighty than beads, too, so theoretically cause less damage to your hair. What intrigues me the most, however, is that a) they’re made from ‘virgin Russian hair’ – I didn’t ask, but I presume that means pure, ethically sourced human hair rather than hair plucked from a poor Muscovite with her hymen still intact. And b) you should only wash them using a downward motion, which will make shampoo time fun.
It took all of three hours to put the extensions in, but I did feel like I’d stepped out of an ’80s L’Oréal ad when they were done. I had properly big, bouncy, swish-it-allabout hair for the first time in my life. So great did I feel that I went straight from the salon to a hot date. I have genuinely never felt more confident meeting a guy. I thought nothing could go wrong with that hair. I was wrong. The date was a disaster. Still, I did have good hair while I was enduring it.
Three months into my micro rings and there have been no breakages, no rogue tendrils scattered on the pillow in the morning, and no bald patches. As for me? I’m making up for all those lost teenage years by flicking my new hair at everyone from my poor Uber driver to the guy who delivered my ASOS order.
Some girls like to apply expensive make-up to feel good. Some lift weights three times a week and some turn to Botox. And some, like me and Dolly Parton, just wear a hell of a lot of hair not grown out of our own follicles.