How Wearing Extensions Helped Me Value My Own Hair
We all have #HairGoals, and mine is singular: Kim Kardashian-like, to-my-waist, super-effing-long hair. Here's why: My hair’s my thing. I rarely wear jewelry or accessories, currently punctuating my look instead with Lauren Conrad-length hair. I take three supplements a day (Nutrafol, bioton, and folic acid) and will let only Serge Normant Salon’s Matthew Fugate approach me with scissors, though he calls it an "aircut" because he jokes he’s “cutting more air than hair.”
But while I strive to reach Rapunzel-status, my job as a beauty writer requires that I collect hairstylists for stories the way people collect china dolls, which means I turn down haircuts nearly weekly. To keep my locks from being lopped off, I often use the excuse that "I have a haircut scheduled the next day." I’ve even blamed Mercury being in retrograde (everyone knows you never get your hair cut when Mercury is in retrograde - thankyouverymuch, Susan Miller!). I have to say, my strategy has always worked until I attended the opening of a new location for a well-known salon last year. When my stylist got to work on my blowout, the salon owner sashayed over and launched his campaign: “You need a haircut,” he said. “I know, I have one scheduled tomorrow though!” I politely declined five times. Finally, he used the word “microtrim,” so I let him cut my hair. He promptly hacked off 5 inches. To my horror, my long-labored Khaleesi coif became a lob.
The next two weeks, my Google history showed nothing but “Can you die from an overdose of biotin?” The dowdy length made me feel like a soccer mom. Worse, my former mane was such a part of my self-expression: Strategic hair flips for theatrical effect are vital to how I talk.
I made an appointment with Fugate for hair extensions, which I worried would become an ongoing part of my baseline beauty repertoire from here on in, like the Courtney Akai-applied lash extensions I’ve been addicted to since 2009. Would hair extensions would be yet another gateway beauty drug? But since the alternative was approximately 500 bad hair days waiting for my hair to grow back to where it was, I decided to try them anyway.
I spent about $300 - thanks to my editorial discount - on the hair. When one pays for hair, I reasoned, one should leave with extensions that rival Blake Lively’s actual magical mane. Fugate taped in the extensions at the salon - this involves sandwiching thin slivers of hair beneath the outermost layer of your hair so they remain invisible - and I was hooked as soon as I looked in the mirror. It was aspirational, Lana Del Rey-meets-water nymph hair. Season-one Serena van der Woodsen - you get the idea. As a person with a decent, but not decadent amount of hair, it instantly made me feel 57 percent prettier. As Mindy Kaling says in her book, Why Not Me, "The real trick to having gorgeous hair is quantity. Piles of thick, cascading, My Little Pony-style hair signifies youth, so if you don’t have that, you are basically announcing that you are old and dying. To keep up with the trend, everyone uses hair extensions.” I finally had Hollywood hair.
I wish I could tell you that walking around with an intricate system of thicker human hair taped to mine didn’t make a gigantic difference with regard to the male gaze. But in the months after I got "Gloria" (yes, I named my extensions, because they were from someone else's head, so I felt it was nice to honor the undisclosed donor), a college student asked for my number, as did multiple gentlemen when I went on makeup-free runs. Every photo looked better, every side braid was positively Everdeenesque.
Gloria’s gravitas also granted me an additional 48 hours between washes. But it wasn’t a perfectly symbiotic relationship. My own hair dried in five minutes, while Gloria’s was still more than damp 30 minutes later - it was, after all, two different hair textures now fused on one person's head. Tape-in extensions also only look great for about two months, and then you have to get them moved back up toward the root (so the taped part stays secure and doesn't twist around and become visible - the key is to always keep it lying flat against your head), which meant I had to go get Gloria “reinstalled” every four to six weeks. Texture was an issue for me and Gloria as well, despite her “wavy” descriptor. For example, my hair turned into humidity-induced spirals on a recent trip to the Caribbean, while Gloria remained super straight after we took a dip in the ocean. That said, the compliments I got in temperate climates kept me saying, “Just two more months.”
After six months had passed, my hair had grown back close to its former length, but I had the hair equivalent of body dysmorphia. Was my own hair really this thin? (It wasn’t.) Concealing the taped-in pieces and managing two textures had become exhausting. I decided Gloria had to be "no moria." She’d served her purpose and I loved her for what she did for me. I'd be lying to you if I told you the first few days weren't depressing - I felt like I had a phantom limb.
Here's where I went wrong: To take the extensions out, I made the mistake of ordering some extension tape solvent on Amazon, rather than having them professionally removed. I ended up leaving it on a little too long, which made my hair kind of break off, and has since led to a situation much like growing out my bangs, but only on the back of my head. Chic, right?! Overall, my hair seemed thinner and weaker than it had been immediately post-extensions, so I had to employ some tricks, like adding mousse to my roots, creating waves with a flat iron, and straightening the ends to make my hair look longer and fuller. Shortly after I got my style groove back, I felt good about my natural, God-given strands again. It took about six months post-extensions, but my hair is finally about as thick and long as it was before the whole debacle. And I’m no longer upset when I see myself tagged in photos.
Leading-lady locks were definitely a confidence booster, but they also took time, energy (I’d have to wrangle Gloria into braids and barrettes, and then she’d break them like a follicular Hulk Hogan due to her massive thickness), and a lot of money. But while we often all want hair we don’t have, after months of extended drying time, curling-iron wielding, and a metric ton of hairspray, I’ve found peace somewhere in the middle by accepting my healthy, extension-free, low-maintenance hair that I couldn't appreciate more.
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