Some thoughts on long hair...

[angharad_gam]

I read something that resonated recently about long hair. I can't remember where. Honestly I need to start writing down references for cool things I read. So often I go 'I read something cool about that in ...um....yeah...it was cool'. Anyway. The thesis of this thing was that having very long hair is a study in carefully managed neglect. Which is actually kind of true. Many people think my hair must take up a lot of time. It doesn't. I brush it once a day. I wash it approximately twice a week. I use cheap shampoo. I very rarely indulge in fancy hairstyles. I don't use a lot of product.

My hair is currently about a metre long and has been for the last ten years or so. That puts it down to about mid thigh on me. Before that I had long hair for most of my life, but I had never really been able to grow it past the small of my back. For a long time I assumed that pregnancy hormones were responsible for the extra growth, but after reading the aforementioned thing I'm now beginning to think it might have other causes. After all, Ashwyn turns six on Tuesday, so any pregnancy inspired growth should well and truly have gone by now.

Basically, to grow your hair long you need to keep it strong, and stop it from getting brittle. If it becomes dry and brittle then it will snap and you will just end up with a bunch of split ends. Washing your hair less frequently means that your hair is less dried out by shampoo (and regardless of how much you condition there is still some drying out going on - the difference in my hair after I have washed it is quite remarkable). You need to brush your hair some or it will turn into dreadlocks. Brushing also helps to distribute the oil from your scalp through to the ends of your hair and keep it supple. But if you brush it too much or get a lot of tangles, it will again lead to breakages and split ends. Hair is weaker when it is wet - I have a long standing rule of never brushing my hair when it is wet. Here you may begin to see the carefully managed neglect coming out.

Around the time I got pregnant is also the time I started working, and when I started working I started wearing my hair braided most days. These days I wear my hair in a braid most days and most nights for that matter. It makes for less tangles and makes it easy to brush. Now I'm thinking it is perhaps this, and not the pregnancy stuff that has enabled me to grow my hair longer.

I sometimes wonder the point of having it this long if I can only wear it braided most of the time, but there's a degree of vanity involved, and a great deal of my identity tied up in this hair. Hence the reluctance to wreck it with injudicious dying. Although I was looking at dyes in the supermarket again yesterday...

Anyway, it's crazy birthday week here in crazy town. I'm planning to try something a bit ambitious in the cake department, so expect photos of either really awesome stuff, or complete catastrophes, but probably not until the end of the week.

Comments

[reverancepavane.livejournal.com]

How about a really awesome cake depicting the crash of an airliner filled with nuclear fuel waste into a hospital full of kindergarten kids whilst Cthulhu looks on in glee?

Then again someone did a nice Azathoth cake. Although it was probably closer to a Baked Alaska on a string.

[angharad-gam.livejournal.com]

Well I could probably manage a Cthulhu cake. Although I might need to stock up on green food colouring...

[davidcook.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, and now I begin to see why mine has never gone past mid-shoulder-blade level (when straightened, it's slightly curly at the ends), despite not cutting it since I moved to Melbourne (ummm, 15 years or so ...).

('s is about waist-length too, but we're all amateurs compared to one of the architects at work whose hair is somewhere down around his calves (!))

[angharad-gam.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's impressive. I think that must be starting to be inconvenient though. Mine definitely gets in the way if I wear it loose. I've shut it in car doors, caught it in wet paint, nearly plugged myself into electrical sockets...

The longest I've gone without cutting it was 11 years. Then I needed to get about four or five inches taken off because of split ends. It freaked me out to not have the end of my braid at hand level (when my hands are sitting in my lap), but it's since grown back.

Mine's also a lot curlier than it used to be, and I think if it wasn't weighed down by it's own weight it might be curlier still.

Identity

[dotcom1144.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

I guess the problem with having your identity tied up in physical stuff, it is so subject to change due to things beyond your control - age, illness, accident etc. Though I suppose with the possibility of things like dementia the same could be said about an identity based on mental capacity or personality. Identity is one of those strange things that is hard to define, both continuous and fleeting (google the Ship of Theseus for an interesting philosophical paradox). You are tied to who you have been but you aren't necessarily who you were. The hair might be who you were but not who you are now, or it might be who you are now but not who you will be in a year's time.

I guess that's why the existentialists were so tied up in the idea that you not only make yourself through your experience, but that you are continually making yourself until the day you die.