I love looking at old photos before, say, 1983, when hair products consisted of a few gender specific items sold at the drugstore. Everyone's hair was different; whatever each of us was lucky (or unlucky) enough to have been born with.
Our 1970s supermarket had Suave and Head and Shoulders, sure, but there was no mousse and Dippity Do hair gel was used, at least in my age group, only by ballerinas at recital time and the local "Coquines", synchronized swim team which performed underwater dance.
When I began reading beauty magazines like Seventeen, something new called hair mousse arrived on the scene. The very first ad I saw for mousse was by L'Oreal. Their brand-new product called "Free Style" was touted as being very 'French' and only for the most discerning of ladies.
Immediately intrigued, I thought, well, I study French in school and although I'm not what you'd call discerning, I definitely have a ton of hair, and it tends toward extreme frizz. I had been brushing it incessantly with my cream and salmon colored Denman brush which was supposed to calm it down but produced exactly the opposite effect. As soon as I could, I rushed out to CVS to purchase L'Oreal mousse with my babysitting money.
Now, I can distinctly remember it was a little over 2 dollars a can. In today's babysitting dollars I'm guessing that would be equal to 20 or 30 bucks, but even if it had cost more, I would have figured out a way to buy it. To get a backup can, I even asked for it for my birthday. It became the white whale of beauty products for a young girl like me.
I bought one and brought it home in my white CVS paper bag along with some Clearasil and one of my favorite Paper Mate erasable pens. Giddy with anticipation, I marched straight to the bathroom, washed my hair by leaning over our claw foot tub and moussed it according to the directions while my chest recovered from being smushed upside down for 10 minutes against the cast iron. After blow drying it with our white plastic Conair dryer, it appeared nice and shiny but was still puffier than I liked, so I got the swell idea of putting my Dad's fedora hat on for about an hour after I dried it, flattening it out. Having the mousse in it smoothed the cuticle under the hat and that made me super happy. The mousse-then-hat stunt became a routine which caused my late arrival for a lot of events that year, and when Dad wanted to wear the hat, there was a tug of war as to who really needed the chapeau-come-salon secret that night.
Walking the aisle of hair products in our grocery store today can be overwhelming and there is a large section of TJ Maxx simply for hair serums and sprays which far surpass the average mousse both in claims, and in price. And actually, mousse is sort of difficult to come by nowadays. I heard the term "product graveyard" yesterday, cannily descriptive of the undersink in many people's bathrooms; full of tress tamers we've bought and never use.
Less product agrees with my hair as time goes on, something I discovered mostly because I grew tired of dithering around with it for the last 40 years and also because my hair is increasingly porous and anything I put in it either turns it to straw or juices it up into a gluey mess. And wouldn't you know, oddly, I have grown the softest baby hair again. It's gone back to the hair I had in elementary school. I pull a sweater over my head and hundreds of filaments stick to my face in staticy unison. It flies around like scattered leaves when the wind blows; most times, straight into my lip balm. It creates Naval quality sailor knots in my sleep which require some patient and tricky undoing in the morning so that I don't have to hack them out with scissors. It smells like my leave in conditioner and serum, which is, unless I'm going somewhere super humid or super fancy, are the only things I put in it.
Simplifying my hair products has brought me a sort of back to the good old days satisfaction. Using less feels right.
On deck, body products.
#mushroomtumbler
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