An Ode To Loving Big Hair

This is is an ode to you, my fellow big haired brethren. Let’s raise a glass to the good fortune of never having caught on fire, because Lord knows our hair is more flammable than most things at the bar. This is for the girls whose arms ache from the copious amount of minutes spent backcombing strands until they pile up high on our scalps like freshly swirled ice cream. Pour a little from your oversized wine glass for the portions of our paychecks spent on hairspray and the fallen warriors whose hair came out looking like a rat’s nest rather than a beehive.

We have mastered the art of big hair my comrades and are always there to assist a sister when our phone is flooded with texts asking, “Can you do my hair tonight?” We always smile and act pleasant as we wreck havoc on their flat hair and transform it into a work of art…but never quite as good as the masterpiece that is our ‘do’. Dates, parties, and work functions are our catwalks and our hair is the supreme model. Although, the lengths we go to, to make our hair look effortlessly voluminous and bouncy is usually a process longer than the function itself.

Yet despite the fact that we most often awaken with locks similar to a haphazardly made birds nest, we smile as we use half a bottle of conditioner in the shower just thinking about how awesome we will look in the Instagram pictures from the night before. We cringe at photographs from middle school when our twelve year old selves first discovered a flat iron, and laugh at our mother’s giant 80’s poofs; because we have perfected the middle ground between outrageous rock hair and stick straight tresses. We are the Goldilocks of the generations, our hair the perfectly right fit.

The only thing that can ever slow us down are the treacherous elements we encounter. Wind, which whips around our polished coifs into a shape much akin to something an unexperienced gardener would clip hedges into. It whirls around the tresses we worked so long on and makes us face the fact that not even the most resilient of hairsprays can keep our big hair in place. But the worst threat to us, even more deadly than wind, is the miserable element of rain. There’s light rain which turns our hair into massive frizz bombs and there’s the equally annoying heavy rain which makes us look like drowned rats. Beautiful and confident as we may be tucked safely in the shelter of the indoors, we transform into wicked witches melting beneath the powers of rain the second we step outside during a drizzle or downpour.

Yet, we trudge on and whip out the comb we have stashed in our purses and make the most of the ride/uber/walk to the bar and always arrive looking flawless. I salute you fellow big hair lovers when I say the higher the hair the closer to God is our motto and the teasing comb is our weapon of choice.