A Hairy Affair

Today I bought a brush. A brush? You may ask, full of doubt of how the purchase of a hairbrush could possibly be fodder for a blog post.

I have needed a new hairbrush now for a long while, but every time I go shopping, I inevitably forget to buy one. I forget about it until the next morning after showering when I actually pull my old, ratty one out of the drawer to comb my hair. Unlike other people I know, I don’t normally carry a comb/brush with me and I very rarely comb my hair more than once a day. You see, I am totally inept at the art of hair dressing in any shape or form. I wear a ponytail, a bun, or a French braid. That’s it! I wash my hair, dry it half-way (because it would take hours to do it all the way), and put it up. No styling, no nothing.

I know some women at work that religiously take out their brushes and make up kit to retouch their look a couple times a day. Hell, one of them even had a straightening iron and nail polish in her desk drawer. Yesterday I watched a friend of my son, who is in her twenties, take a whole hour to style her hair using a flat iron. I was in awe because I would sooner poke my eyes out than take that much time on my hair any day.

The older I get, the more I begrudge the time spent in front of a mirror. When I was younger I wore very little make-up, but now I feel the need to wear foundation. If I don’t—with the tone of my complexion and acne scars—I run the very real risk of having people confuse me with a ghost, or worse, a zombie. I absolutely rue the ten minutes or so I have to spend every morning applying moisturizer, foundation, concealer, shade, eyeliner, mascara, blush and a touch of lip color. It just seems like such a waste of my time. I would much rather be reading or writing. But alas! One must not scare the crowds.

My hair, on the other hand, was always generously thick and abundant. Now it’s lightish brown but, for most of my life, it was multi-colored; very light brown with shades of gold and red. My mom’s favorite childhood story is the one about how people would stop her at the market when I was still a toddler, and ask her why she decided to dye such a young child’s hair? (check out this picture of me when I was about three or four.I was kind of cute, wasn’t I?)

I always had a love-hate relationship with my hair. I have worn it super long, long, bobbed and boy-short. As a teenager I still bothered doing “hair treatments” to bring out my natural highlights. I spent some considerable amount of time dry-brushing my normally out-of-control mane (check out my disco-phase picture when I was about 18-years old and had some serious strawberry blond hair).

Not anymore. Once in a blue moon I decide that I’m tired of my non-look and I go to a nice hair stylist who charges me triple what I normally pay at Hair Cuttery to have a “good” haircut; you know, the kind you can actually wear down and makes you look like a superstar. Five minutes after I leave such places, my hair goes up into a ponytail because I can’t stand my hair flying all over my face.

But I digress…the point is I always forget to buy a new brush because it does not have that big of a role in my life as it has in other people’s lives (including my three guys). So remembering to buy a brush was kind of momentous for me today and I thought it deserved a special blog post. It’s a cool one with a zebra design that slides through my thick, always-entangled hair as if cutting through butter. What can I say? Little things make me happy.