Ever abreast of the fashion zeitgeist, I note that the new face of Zara, (a popular fashion chain,) is sporting a PERM. Admittedly, it’s a tumble of artificially induced soft waves – but a PERM nonetheless.
Lady readers of a certain vintage remember with mixed emotions the craze for the perm. Hair salons stank with the eyewatering fumes of ammonia that would’ve felled horses. The process was a time-consuming and risky one, but there was no shortage of respectable matrons who, thrice yearly, gave over an asphyxiating afternoon to have ‘a wee perm’.
Soon, ‘home’ perms hit the market, with the brand leader’s inspired advertising strapline, “Which twin has the Toni?” The product flew off the shelves.
However perilous the perm in professional hands, it was an amateur’s nightmare. How a perm ‘takes’ is dependent on the texture of the hair and one recipe doesn’t suit all. My mother, suffering from asthma, couldn’t endure a ‘salon do’ and suggested that I, (aged 15, unskilled) should administer her a home perm in our backyard. Sitting on a kitchen chair, swathed in towels, her nose buried in another, her inhaler to hand, we began, me with one eye on the instructions, inexpertly sectioning, winding and securing the hair with rubber-clipped curlers while dabbing her head with the vile-smelling solution. The end result was … interesting – and the experiment never repeated. Fortunately, my mother had a passion for hats.
The 60s explosion of television and the fashion youthquake brought modernity to our ‘shampoo and set’ provincial backwater. The Twiggy crop and Vidal Sassoon bob generated a reckless determination to have the latest look, whether or not we had the features to carry it off. Hair salons proliferated and the weekly ‘do’ became de rigeur. Thus I discovered one of the few male stylists in the northwest. “You have great hair,” he said. (All stylists say this.) First go was a deliciously ragged and wispy razor cut. I was 16 and thin and thrilled with myself. From there we progressed to the geometric bob. Alas, my hair is not perfectly straight. Two minutes in the damp air of a Derry afternoon and the sleek undercurves of the sides turned outwards and upwards like coat hooks. Besides, the style made me positively moonfaced and I wasn’t getting much sleep with six metal spring-clips down each side at night.
The 70s hippy revolution rolled across the Atlantic bringing the lugubrious Joni Mitchell image of long, centre-parted curtains of hair, which, if not naturally poker-straight had to be encouraged so by frequent ironing. Instead, I had a ‘coupe sauvage’ – a kind of layered, shaggy busby that fell obediently into place no matter what you did to it. By the 80s, Princess Diana had us all trying the ‘wedge’ cut – short back and sides topped by an angled slab of longer hair on the crown. (Donald Trump wears a tragic version of it to this day.) ‘Dynasty’ and its glamorous ilk brought back bouffants, elaborate up-dos and an extra salon hour being hairpinned and enameled into rigidity with industrial quantities of heavy-duty hairspray and the prospect of having to sleep sitting up. That period also spawned the unwelcome ‘unisex’ salon where you couldn’t move for lanky youths hogging the climazone machine in Cleopatra head-dresses of tinfoil strips having highlights put in, or a ‘bodywave’ to produce the wet curly cocker-spaniel look of their sporting heroes.
Today, men spend more on grooming than women, the macho young emulating reality show contestants and celebrities. Gone the half-crown barber and his slick of brilliantine – now it’s hair as topiary or sculpture. I see sub-teens with strange tonsure-like hairdos or symbols shorn into their scalps. I lingered by the open door of a male grooming salon recently to the sound of a deafening buzz. There wasn’t a scissor in sight. It looked like a mass sheep-shearing.
To my male contemporaries thinning on top and pondering – unless you’ve a perfectly shaped skull and regularly proportioned features like Yul Brynner or David Beckham… keep your hair on!
