Slippery Hair Syndrome

A real and very frustrating but also small and specific personal problem.

Every woman wants something she can’t have, and most of our lives are spent hiding the anatomical facts and just forcing things on ourselves in whatever way we can (usually extreme). Hence the crazy shit we do to our bodies like diets and eyelash extensions and dye jobs and MAKEUP? I mean we literally paint our faces different colors. Why? Because it’s fun and it attracts the jealousy of other women and also Instagram. That seems fine, I just want to say on the record: it’s objectively strange. I do it every day.

But I want to focus specifically on hair. I have stick-straight hair, and I’ve always wanted “body”—before I knew what that otherwise-noun even meant when applied to anything non-corporeal, I knew that I had to have it. My Tía Irma used to put rollers in my hair (for fun, for dressup, I don’t know, she was a third-grade schoolteacher who read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe to me and I was her grade-school niece she loved to spoil.) Since then, I’ve replicated the effect a few times, but it’s taken about thirty years for me to realize that MOST women I see on the screens are not gifted with three heads’ worth of hair but instead are wearing extensions, curling ironed and beachy-waved and floofed to perfection.

I’m reminded of a scene from a movie that I can only admit I watched because I saw it on a plane: How To Be Single, with Dakota Johnson and Rebel Wilson. Alison Brie plays an overeager, almost Charlotte-type, hyper-connected and buzzing with anxious strategies to “attract” the right “mate.” One day, mourning a fresh breakup, she melts down in the middle of her volunteer job: reading a picture book (The Very Lucky Princess) to children at a bookshop. She rejects the happily-ever-after moral and tells her own bitter story of love instead. Consumed with rage at the patriarchy/system/men/life, she begins to tear off her clothing. “HEELS?!?!” she shrieks at them, kicking off her stilts. She starts tugging at her Spanx and tries to cut them off with childrens’ scissors. “AND THIS HAIR?!?! THIS HAIR ISN’T EVEN REAL!!!!!” She pulls at her own brunette locks and whole sections of hair start to dissolve and melt off her head. As a person who frequently gets upset by how unachievably GOOD the actors always look in these shitty romcoms, I was so relieved. Alison Brie was wearing fake hair and that made me feel so much better.

I have only ever known “body” as a sort of sensual buoyancy made possible only by big hot foam rollers and A LOT of hairspray. The magic moment lasts about five to ten minutes, until I run my greasy paws through my mane, and then it’s basically over once my hair hits the open air. Like a balloon, everything deflates, and ringlets fall into a straight line. The ends will retain a slight flip, but that’s as far as it goes. It’s not even that I have terribly fine hair, or not a lot of hair. I would generally call my hair “normal” except for the fact that it is slippery as fuck.

My hair is so slippery, it will not stay in a braid. Normal hair things (technical term) do not work for me, so I have hoarded the only ones I’ve ever found that do, and I only have two left. One of them is in my hair right now. No barrette has ever not slipped down the side or back of my head. Claw clips? The only ones that work are the ones that are full head-sized and even then my hair still falls out of them.

The Hunt For The Perfect Hair Thing

I realize that I can put waxes and dirt and oils and potions into my hair to make it more “textured” but you know what is even worse than slippery hair? Mucky hair (also technical term). I also realize that mine is a very specific kind of white-girl complaint: I have satiny ribbons of very smooth hair that will do nothing but fall straight down and maybe at best crimp around my ears. Sometimes when it’s humid I get ghost ringlets around my temples. I don’t know what to tell you, as a baby I had those soft, ethereal curls you see on cherubs in Renaissance paintings, and now, despite having a Mexican mother with jet-black, wiry-coarse, and—it goes without saying WILDLY VOLUMINOUS—hair, I got these boring chestnut strands that refuse to do anything “cool.” I even tried cutting it all off once, and soon enough I had basically a modified bowl cut.

This is just one of those realizations you make in life as you get older and less patient with things like diets and fashion and you just realize: your body is the way it is, mostly, and my scalp is only capable of extruding this one kind of hair, for now, whether I wash it or not. Hopefully it will keep producing hair as long as I am alive, though I doubt it will be this chestnut color for very much longer. I look forward to founding my local chapter of the Slippery Hair Society and trading tips for hairstyles, no wait never mind, you can’t style slippery hair. Dammit.