Cut and (blow)dry

Why do women have such a complicated relationship with their hair?

It says something about Beyonce’s superstar status that even so mundane a thing as getting a new – albeit drastic – haircut sparks off a worldwide debate. It began when the singer posted a picture on Instagram, premiering her new gamine crop. Gone were the flowing, teased into curls, golden tresses. In their place was a punishingly short pixie haircut that perfectly set off her sculpted cheekbones and taut jawline.

With a certain predictability, the social media universe went into meltdown, with fans debating the merits and demerits of the new hairstyle on Twitter, Facebook and the many, many fan sites dedicated to the singer. Well, everything Beyonce does creates a media storm, so why should her hairstyle choices be any different?

But the flurry of ‘Beyonce chops off hair; what does it mean?’ stories just reminded me once again just how complicated the relationship between a woman and her hair is. Nothing a woman does to her hair is ever simple. How can it be, when we are forever looking for meaning in it?

Is she tiring of her sex symbol status and wants to try out a more demure avatar? Is this a sign of her reconnecting with her masculine side? Or more mundanely, does this mean that short, gamine crops are now ‘in’ and long, flowing hair is just a little bit dated?

Well, I am guessing that for a while at least, the short crop will become the trendy choice. I am old enough to remember just what a rage the ‘Rachel’ was (with Friends fans queuing up at hair salons with photographs of Jennifer Aniston to get the same layered bob; imagine their disappointment later when Aniston confessed that she had, in fact, hated the cut). And back home in India, we still call a style that involves a short ‘fringe’ or ‘bangs’ the Sadhana cut, after the 60s actress who first popularized it.

So, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if chopping off all your hair and going really short became known as ‘doing a Beyonce’. Well, it would be way better than ‘doing a Britney’; remember Spears’ slightly crazy phase a few years back when she shaved off all hair and emerged from the salon with a completely bald pate?

But even if you exclude spectacular breakdowns like Britney’s, hair is still a good way to gauge a woman’s mood. If it looks glossy and well-cared-for, then the odds are that she is a good place. If it looks limp, dirty of unkempt, then she is probably not feeling too happy (though that bad mood may just be down to the fact that she is having a bad hair day).

And then, there is the stereotyping that all of us are guilty of at one level or another. If she wears her hair in a demure bun, she must be a behenji. That one with the purple highlights in her hair; keep her away from your sons. Short, cropped hair with not so much as a whiff of hair gel? Must be a lesbian. Long, impeccably blow-dried hair? Has to be a vain, self-obsessed, lady-who-lunches with way too much time on her hands. Oh yes, there is stereotype to go with every hairstyle.

Speaking for myself, I can chart the various phases of my life by the way my hair looked during that period. The pig-tails and braids mark the decorous schoolgirl; the long, swishy hair left open to tumble down the back are a reminder of college days and a new-found freedom; that very unfortunate perm is a reminder of my callow youth. The shorter, layered style celebrated the beginning of my professional life; the gamine crop that followed was me trying out a new persona; and the blunt bob that I sport to this day marks the moment when I truly became comfortable in my skin.

Yes, you wouldn’t think to look at it, but hair is often telling us the story of a woman’s life. The moment of teenage rebellion when she chops off the long hair her mother has spent years oiling and braiding; the drastic change in colour or style that marks the end of a long relationship; the decision to eschew hair dye and embrace the grey as a mark of the inevitable passage of years.

Ah yes, to dye or not to dye: that’s the nagging question that most of my contemporaries are dealing with right now. And the only shades of grey in this debate lie in the roots of our hair; otherwise it is all very black and white. The no-dye lobby insists that this is the way to grow old: gracefully, with dignity, and with every white root on display. The dye-hard brigade scoffs at this defeatist attitude and promises that it is not going down without a fight (and some lovely highlights for good measure). Good hair, they proclaim, is worth dyeing for.

As for me, I am not ready to go grey yet. Or abandon the safety net of my bob. Or even give up the extravagance of having my hair professionally blow-dried. Because, like most women of my acquaintance, my self-image is inextricably tied up with my hair.

Who are you calling aunty?

That traumatic moment when you realise you have tipped irrevocably into middle age

Last week a friend of mine called up sounding distraught. Given that she is generally a ‘glass is half-full’ sort of person, I thought that there must be a major crisis in her life. As it turns out, I was right. She was suffering from a serious case of mid-life crisis, sparked off by a visit to a five-star hotel loo.

It happened thus. She walked in and found a gaggle of excitable 20-somethings gibbering excitedly amongst themselves. They were still gathered around the sink when she emerged to wash her hands. And then, lipstick liberally re-applied, they started trooping out when one of them stopped and asked: “Whose bag is that?”

Without missing a beat, the other replied, pointing to my hapless friend, “That’s aunty’s.”

Yes, you heard right. It was that dreaded ‘a’ word. Aunty.

My friend, a well-preserved woman in her 40s, is used to seeing people do double-takes when she reveals her age and assuring her that she looks at least a decade younger. So, the ‘aunty’ bit was a fell blow that left her catatonic for the rest of the evening.

When she called me the next morning, she still sounded devastated. Did she really look so old that 20-something young women would refer to her as ‘aunty’? Did this mean that she was well and truly middle-aged now? Were the best years of her life over? Was she now on a slippery slope heading inexorably downwards?

I have to confess that I wasn’t terribly sympathetic. As someone who acquired her first niece at the age of 12 (in my defence, my sister is 15 years older than me), I have become accustomed to being called ‘masi’ or ‘bua’ over the years. So what, I asked my friend, was the big deal about being called ‘aunty’? After all, technically speaking, she could have given birth to any of those young 20-somethings. And her kid’s friends called her ‘aunty’ anyway, right?

That wasn’t the point, said my friend. “Standing there at the sink, I had this sudden epiphany. Now when people looked at me, they no longer saw as an attractive woman. They saw an ‘aunty’. They saw someone who was well past her sexy-by date. And as I stood there, I realised that soon nobody would see me at all.”

Yes, that’s a fear that all of us harbour at some level, don’t we? That as age takes its toll and nature wreaks its worst on us, we will turn into invisible women. The women whom nobody pays attention to; who are looked through at parties; ignored as they try to make purchases at a store. The women whom nobody leaps up to open the door for. The women nobody wants to chat up or flirt with. The women who are no longer seen as sexual beings.

In other words, the women who fit into the ‘aunty’ category.

And, for obvious reasons, this is especially hard for women who have been considered beautiful or sexy in their dewy youthfulness. They are used to being the centre of attention in any room they walk into. They are accustomed to being treated with deference. They are used to being objects of desire. They are conditioned to think of themselves as special. So suddenly being reduced to ‘aunty’ status comes as something of a shock.

And to an extent, it was this ‘Beautiful Woman’ syndrome that lay at the root of my friend’s trauma. It was a bit like the jolt an actress feels when she’s first told that she not being tested for the heroine’s role, but for the role of the hero’s mother.

But part of it was also down to the fact that ours is the generation of women who refuse to age. We are unwilling to let Nature take its course when it comes to our appearance. Instead, we rely on extreme medical procedures to keep looking young for as long as we can.

Ours is the generation that embraced Botox and fillers, treating them as lunch-time procedures. Ours is the generation that treats cosmetic surgery as an essential beauty aid, treating face-lifts as extreme facials. And not surprisingly, ours is a generation that looks much younger than our mothers did at our age.

We exercise and diet so that we weigh the same as we did in our 20s. We wear the same clothes as our grown-up daughters. We colour our hair every five weeks to get rid of those greying roots. We slather on the anti-ageing cream last thing at night.

We look in the mirror in the morning and we see a young person staring back at us. Yes, the jawline is a little slack, there is incipient creping of the neck, and the laugh lines run a little bit deeper. But hey, nobody would put us down for 40-something. We don’t look at day over 35!

And then, you walk into a five-star hotel loo and a 20-something calls you ‘aunty’. That’s when you know that the game is well and truly over. You have tipped irrevocably into middle age – and there is no coming back.

Vanity fair

There is something wrong with a world in which your man has more beauty products than you do

So, what is it going to be? Go grey with dignity? Or dye unto death? I am, for a change, talking about men here. Should the male of the species allow nature to take its course or should he fall back on the marvels of artifice and hair colour?

I can see the arguments on both sides of the dye divide. Grey hair on men can be both distinguished and sexy in a slightly rakish George Clooney/Richard Gere sort of way. It shows that you have grown up and – with a bit of luck – grown out of childish things. You are ready to be taken seriously. And, more importantly, you have more weighty things to think about than the greying of your locks.

On the other hand, there is no denying the fact that greying hair only suits a few people like Kapil Sibal or my former boss Aveek Sarkar. On most others, well, it just makes them look old – sometimes much older than they really are. So, the temptation to reach out for a bit of hair colour is quite understandable.

And in today’s age, when people are judged by appearances more than ever, it is only to be expected that everyone from David Cameron and Barack Obama to Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan is hitting the bottle (of hair dye, I hasten to add) with a vengeance.

These days, it’s all about looking youthful and seeming virile. And frankly, what’s wrong with that?

If we don’t judge women for booking themselves in for fortnightly root touch-ups interspersed with the odd session of highlights, then why should we treat men who dabble in dye with derision?

But while I am willing to grant men a dispensation when it comes to hair colour, I must confess that I have a problem with some of the more outré expressions of male vanity you see on display of late.

Call me sexist – and I am sure you will – but I can’t help but feel that there is something faintly ludicrous about men signing up for a ‘pampering facial’ complete with steaming open of pores, removal of blackheads and a little gentle massage. Whatever happened to the days when men just had an extra-close shave when they were looking for smoother skin? When did all these exfoliating scrubs, deep-cleansing creams and hydrating moisturisers (with an SPF count of no less than 30) find their way into the male grooming routine?

I am guessing it was about the time that the word metrosexual first crept into our dictionary. But even allowing for the fact that men have as much of a right to smell nice and have silky smooth skin as women, don’t you think that things are getting a tad out of hand now?

Now be honest here, ladies. Don’t you feel that there is something wrong with a world in which he has more skincare products than you do? Doesn’t it annoy you that he spends more time than you in front of the mirror worrying about his complexion (and wondering if it’s worth giving Fair and Handsome a whirl)? Isn’t it plain wrong that he has more clothes than you do and spends far longer in front of his wardrobe agonising about what to wear? Or that he takes much longer than you to get dressed for an evening out? (I mean, seriously, what is that about? Keeping a man waiting while you fussed over your make-up was just about the last honest pleasure left to us!)

And don’t even get me started on this new-fangled craze for male depilation. There is something faintly ridiculous about all that waxing of chest hair, so that those man boobs built up so carefully at the gym can be displayed to their best advantage. You know the kind of guys who do this kind of stuff, don’t you? The kind who model themselves on Salman Khan, spend all their free time in the gym, admiring their own muscles in the mirror as they work out their glutes/pecs/or whatever the hell they are called. And then, it’s off for a steam and sauna, until they finally shower with their lime-scented gels and moisturise, moisturise, moisturise.

In keeping with the Salman Khan image, hair is a big obsession as well. And it’s not just aspiring models and film stars who are signing up for hair weaves, hair extensions or even, the Holy Grail of them all, hair transplants. These days everyone wants thick lustrous hair, from your Average Joe in middle management to the foul-mouthed macho chef Gordon Ramsay (who was recently pictured with that tell-tale bandage at the back of his head). In India, rumour has it, even young male stars sign on for the procedure – not because they are balding (far from it) but simply because it would give them a thicker head of hair.

I’m sorry, but what exactly is sexy about a man who is so insecure about his looks that he has to have a surgical procedure to boost his own confidence? I’ll take the insouciant charm of a bald Sean Connery or a shaven Bruce Willis over this kind of self-consciousness any day. And so, I suspect, would most women.

Truth be told, there is something faintly repellent about this new-found, over-the-top vanity of men. And it makes me long for the days when a dash of Old Spice was all they needed to work their magic.