The Hunt For The Perfect Hair Thing

The Scünci Chronicles

Shipping, distribution, and the Möbius strip of hair elastics

The way this story came to The Hairpin is a good one, and funny. It starts about a year and a half ago, in Honolulu, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, way out in the middle of the Pacific. I was minding my own business, taking a week-long vacation to hang out with my mom for Mother’s Day 2015. (Pretty good gift if you ask me—the gift of my charming company is a good one and it can be yours for the low low price of six nights at the Royal Hawaiian haha JUST KIDDING money can’t buy me love.)

Anyway, one day while I was minding my own business, going for a walk in search of Hawaiian plate lunch from Rainbow Drive-In and some Leonard’s Malasadas, I popped into a Longs Drugs*, because that is a chain they still recognize here (CVS ExtraCare memberships are honored) to pick up some travel essentials. While perusing the aisles—a thing you can only really do when you’re captive in a Longs Drugs—I came across the hair products aisle and spotted an item I had not seen in actual literal YEARS. Scünci’s Soft and Light Hair Hosiery No Damage Elastics. HOLY SHIT!! These things have been dead, discontinued, endangered for years. I knew this because I stopped seeing them in stores and I did my homework and all the commenters online were like “yeah they’re discontinued try these instead,” and “these” were Scünci’s Evolution Gel Elastics made from some kind of squishy silicone. Seems cool, but actually not so cool when it gets stuck and tangled in your fine but slippery hair. Anyway I bought a pack of them and I now regret not having bought ten.

What’s so special about these hair bands, you did not ask? Well, let me tell you: they are the only good hairbands out there that are made from ONE SINGLE CONTINUOUS PIECE OF FABRIC. They’re the Möbius strip of hair elastics. They’re called “hosiery” because they’re made of really thick, stretchy fabric. Imagine a pair of very high-denier tights, but made for the legs of dolls. The size of one of these hair bands is like the same as when I touch my thumb and forefingertip together (and I have very small hands). Now take that pair of tights, and with all your MacGyverish, Little House on the Prairie she-cleverness, cut them HORIZONTALLY into small, coronal slices. Each pair of doll tights will give you like forty hair bands!!! And you know the best part? There are NO SEAMS, so there is no breakage.

There’s nothing worse than twisting and tying your hair into a ponytail only for the hair thingy (technical term) to split right at the glue seam and pop off into space, possibly hitting some stranger on the treadmill in the eye. What gives, Scünci? Why do most of the rest of your hair elastics have a very obvious weak spot that always breaks, or if it doesn’t break right away, becomes the site of the worst kind of loosening. The worst is when your hair band just kind of gives up on life and gets a “run,” and there’s just forever a stretched-out section that will never go back to being elasticky. The end is nigh and you know it.

So anyway, back to ali waller. She asked a common acquaintance for my email address, and that person gave her the wrong email address—well not exactly the WRONG address, but an address I never check. It’s sort of my decoy address because everyone knows you need at least five different Gmail identities if you’re going to be anyone in this modern world. She emailed this piece to me and asked if it might be a good fit for The Hairpin. That was four days ago, on October 21st. Today, on October 25th, our mutual friend asked, hey, did you get an email from ali waller? I checked three of my Gmails—no, I hadn’t. Then I thought, hmm, better check the alt account. Sure enough, there she was! With a hilarious meditation on a discontinued Scünci item that was also a very relatable rant, of the How Did We Get Here variety, about Donald Trump.

I scrambled to reply to ali waller and grab the piece while I still could, all the while sitting poolside at The Royal Hawaiian. You see, I am back in Honolulu, and I have come under the auspices of visiting my mother, who works for a container shipping company that is responsible for MOST of the ITEMS that arrive EVERY DAY to the islands from the mainland. I know what you’re thinking: Shut the fuck up, please don’t brag, it’s not cute. But they have The Internet here and I am working from the time I wake up at around 3 a.m. until like 3 p.m., when I try to chill out, and then my mom and I get dinner at like 5:30 p.m. It’s a very nice lifestyle and I’m very lucky!

I have thought about that particular package of Scünci elastics a lot since last May. What were they doing there, in a Longs Drugs in a strip mall near the Kaimuki neighborhood of Honolulu? This item had probably been discontinued years prior, but because of the nature of How Items Get Shipped and Distributed at Home and Abroad, the last few packages left on earth had ended up in stranger corners of retail where the inventory turnover is EXTREMELY LOW.

I was also thinking about those Scünci elastics because, a year and a half later, out of a pack of twelve pieces, I am on my last two. Both of them are here with me, somewhere in Hawaii, in one of my seven toiletry and makeup bags. This is the nature of Hair Things. They come and go, you stash them in pockets and forget about them and find them in the laundry. They leave you and they come back to you, and there is just always a margin of error so you have to carry extras. A few years ago in a Ricky’s, I found a suitable but not ideal substitute, but the brand name escapes me beyond the fact if its being Italian-sounding.

On this trip, I’ve tried to retrace many of my footsteps from last year, hoping to see familiar sights. My mother is recognized by the valet at the hotel she comes so often. “Gonzalez,” they nod at her warmly. On Sunday, we drove up to the Nu’uanu Pa’li Lookout, explicitly wondering if we’d see the feral chickens we saw last year, clucking around the parking lot and chasing around their little chicks. And as soon as we got out of the car, there they were! A new batch of chicks, to be sure, but squeaky and fuzzy and amazing all the same. How they didn’t blow away in the wind is beyond me. We drove up the North Shore to Haleiwa and I took her back to Mr. Matsumoto’s Shave Ice, desperately hoping to see the same little perfect green lizard I saw last year, lapping up tiny licks of someone’s long-forgotten lychee-and-condensed-milk puddle.

Tomorrow, when I’m done with work for the day, I’m going to go for a walk up Kapahulu Boulevard. I need to go see about some hair things. In the meantime, this piece spoke to me, because it is what we in the content business call ‘relatable.’ And ali waller—I will keep an eye out for item #58634-A for you. I have a feeling that here in Honolulu, where the hair-elastic stock is still frozen in 2007, we may have some luck.

—

*It MAY have been a Walgreens, in which case, replace CVS reference with Rite-Aid or Duane Reade or whatever, they’re literally all the same now.

**Probably not feral, as it appears someone leaves them cans of…cat food?