Hair Diaries 2011 Part I

To all you people who have hair that isn't super thin and straight, praise the heavens right now. I've been wanting to do something with my hair for years. Truly! I snuck this picture of one of my students at the Universität Leipzig almost two years ago:



(I love that intense German swoop.) But have I done anything? No. People probably presume that I just like having long hair. The truth is, the thin, straight, bland-colored nature of my hair discourages me from moving in any direction.

Then, in January, a friend told me about something called a digital perm. After I discovered this picture on Google Images, the wheels wouldn't stop turning:



The process was invented by a Korean company. Doesn't it look great?

I finally called to schedule a digital perm for myself a few weeks ago, after finding some care tips and another great results picture here. But, sadness. They told me on the phone that it usually works only on rough Asian hair. They told me to come in anyway and they'd take a look at my hair's texture. One look and they said, "Sorry, not gonna work." (I kind of knew that. I do have super fine hair.)

So I went for the second-best thing. I decided to get a body wave. These are the pictures I brought with me:







But no matter how much I insisted that these images were labeled as body waves, the beauticians told me that hair will only look like that after being dried and curled with an iron. Boo hoo.

They said it would look more like the following, which I labeled "grody":



I decided to get a body wave anyway, if only to use it for body and not for the curl. What an interesting experience. The place I chose was a most diverse beauty college. Two girls were assigned to work on my hair. One of them had trouble understanding me, and the second girl couldn't understand me or the first girl.

It took forever. And I don't like what it did to the coloring of my hair--the contrast between my roots and the darker ends seems (to me at least) even more extreme and spotty. A Chinese teacher started combing out my hair after the whole process, and I thought, "Yikes, I don't think she's supposed to be doing that." Luckily, another teacher leapt across the room and said, "Don't comb it, you'll loosen the curl!"

But at least I didn't pay as much as I would have anywhere else, my hair does have more body in it, and I got two shampoos/head massages.

My hair kind of feels like hay now, in a positive way, of course. I haven't even tried doing it curly, because I don't want to look disgusting. Maybe the next step would be some cutting options, like these:











Even so, I often think I'm almost done with the long hair thing. How about one of the following?





One thing though: bangs don't work with me. And even these hairstyles (with or without bangs) wouldn't look the same with my kind of hair and my lazy hair-doing habits. Meh. My sister Amy does a pretty great job with her similar hair, though. Sometimes I think I need to stop lusting after the green grass on the other side and just accept what I have. After all, Ellen Page can pull off thin hair, and I think she's cute.



But before I reach that point, let me go write part II . . .