How I survived the ‘Fleabag’ Pencil haircut…
This week, an extreme microbob became the butt of jokes – but, says Glenda Cooper, it’s no laughing matter
While everyone else laughed at the unveiling of television’s most misguided haircut, I winced. On Monday evening, as Claire, the uptight sister of Phoebe Waller-bridge’s character in Fleabag, wailed that her new asymmetric microbob made her look like a pencil, I was taken back seven years when I fell for exactly the same hairstyle.
But unlike Claire, I never tried to blame my hairdresser for ruining my hair (and several months of my life). No, it had been my decision to go avant garde by straightening my naturally
curly hair, cutting off several inches on one side of my head… and chopping several inches more on the other.
My hairdresser had gently tried to dissuade me. But I was convinced that I would look fabulously Gallic and cutting-edge, rather than an exhausted mother of a toddler. Even if it looked to everyone else as if the toddler had been wielding the scissors.
“Is it meant to be like that?” said one (brave) friend. The rest refrained from saying anything. Telling.
My husband, if he’s forgotten where I’ve been for a couple of hours, will say as a safety option, “Your hair looks great!”, after once missing a new style.
But when your ’do remains uncommented on by friends or family – apart from the toddler who cried – I knew this was not my finest hair hour.
Not that I would admit this. Instead, I spent ages with the GHDS trying to recreate the salon blow-dry, which had been closer to Left Bank than left field. I experimented with tucking the longer side behind my ear, but that curiously seemed to make it look weirder. I was in despair.
Because I have always firmly believed, as Fleabag says in the soon-to-be-legendary hairdressers scene, that hair is everything – and has been throughout the ages. Our ancestors had a solemn respect for hair, as the only body part that grows throughout life – and even after death.
Hair has punctuated the best and worst moments of my life – break-ups,
new jobs, exams. I’m convinced that you can carry off the cheapest of outfits at big events if you’re sporting a good blow-dry, and that no designer gear can overcome bad hair. I even went for a cut and blow-dry three days before the due date of my first baby as I (correctly) reasoned that labour would only feel worse with an awful ’do.
And perhaps I clung to the Pencil because, deep down, I knew the truth: it might not have even been the worst of my haircuts. Did that honour go to the Poodle, when I cried all the way down Kilburn High Road after going to a hairdresser who had never cut curly hair before? Or the Mullet? (It was Merseyside, it was the late Eighties, but still inexcusable.) Or even the Tiger Highlights, where the huge clumps of red and blonde dyes a trainee dumped on my head meant I had to keep a winter hat firmly on throughout a sweltering summer wedding?
But I also had to concede that Anthony, the hairdresser in Fleabag, has a point. As he says to Fleabag and Claire, if you want to change your life, change your life – don’t expect to do it in a salon.
In my case, I gave up pretending I was a French sophisticate, with hours to spend each day on adjusting my hair. I returned to the salon to get it cut in a conventional Louise Brooks bob, which was what my lovely hairdresser had wanted to do in the first place. And, ironically, it looked 10 times more edgy.
Perhaps I clung to the Pencil because, deep down, I knew it might not have even been the worst of all my haircuts