How I learned to love my crazy ginger hair
A hate-love story. Or should that be, from enemies to friends...? (Either way, treat yourself to the embarrassing photos within!)
A few weeks ago I was asked to write a piece about my hair (specifically my resistance to having it cut, but also, because the two are inextricably linked, the fact that it is so… ginger) by You magazine (for non-Brits, You magazine is the sunday supplement of the Mail on Sunday). I write for them quite often, usually about books and writers – I’ve interviewed Barbara Kingsolver, Gabrielle Zevin and Mick Herron for them, amongst many others - and I like writing for them. They pay decently and promptly and are incredibly straight and easy to deal with. As any jobbing freelance journalist will tell you, none of those things are particularly common any more. Anyway, they asked me to write about my hair and inevitably the piece I wrote was twice as long as the piece they wanted. Because isn’t that always the way? So, because I’m often asked about my hair, I thought I’d publish the unexpurgated draft here. Along with all the embarrassing pictures that my mum hauled out of the attic. It’s a camera dodger’s worst nightmare! Feel free to have a laugh at my youthful self’s expense.
Sx
I have a complicated relationship with my hair. A hate-love-hate tug of war that started when I was very small. Not to spoiler, but I can tell you now that the tug of war only ended when I stopped fighting and accepted that I was never going to win. My hair has been the boss of me since my late teens. That’s when I gave in. And, once I did, I never looked back.
Before I go any further, let’s deal with the ginger elephant in the room. This is not a piece about having ginger hair, but it’s impossible to talk about my relationship with my hair without at least acknowledging it. I was the only ginger in the class – the school, even – and that, plus the fact that my hair was, by any definition, “big”, wiry, curly, wayward, lay at the root of the problem. (Remember Crystal Tipps of the children’s cartoon Crystal Tipps and Alistair? Keep that image in your mind.)
Picture, if you will, a school nativity play in the early 1970s in an extremely undiverse infants school in the South of England. Stage crammed with small fair people. Mary, cute, blonde. Ditto shepherds and kings. Even the donkeys were blonde. Predictably, all the girls who weren’t Mary were angels. There was a hellish host of us, clad in white sheets, with tin foil wings. Every last one of them, or so it felt to me, with straight blonde-ish hair falling soft around their shoulders or up in cutesy bunches. And then, there was me, tenth angel on the left. With my Curly. Wayward. Ginger. Hair. (And, even then, an uncontrollably FU face.)
I wasn’t cute or blonde and I stood out like a sore thumb. I’m not sure that’s when it started, but it’s the first time I remember knowing life would definitely be better if I could just grow (and ideally completely change the style, colour and texture of) my hair.
My hair was cropped short when I was a toddler (see much further down this piece). A little ginger busy-body with a functional curly crop. As I approached infants school, it grew a little longer, so that by the time I was five, the curls touched my shoulders. After the nativity play it got worse. I became fixated on the bubbles on my head. I needed it to be sleek and smooth and long like Tracey’s or Jessica’s or Diana’s or Rowena’s. I needed it to look like someone else’s hair.
Then came secondary school and the dreaded”flick”. (Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m on about Gen-Xers.) Trisha Yates on Grange Hill was indicative of every girl who scared the life out of me and she had hair to die for. Fair and straight, stretching down her back but with a bang on-trend, massive flicky, fringe. Those two girls in Human League, who danced like panthers at the front, their straight shiny hair in perfect flicks across their foreheads (honestly I would even have settled for Phil Oakey’s glossy asymmetrical mane).
I found a picture in Jackie magazine of a pretty girl with big brown eyes, hair cropped into the nape of her neck and across her ears joining up perfectly with her immaculate feathered flick. Mullets were the order of the late 70s/early 80s day, all the cool girls at school had one and I needed one, too, badly, if I was ever to have a hope of fitting in.
I tore it out and went to the hairdressers. Shoved the picture in her hand and insisted she “do my hair like this”. She suggested gently that my hair type might be, erm, very different from the girl in the picture. Her hair was poker straight and fine, and mine…. Wasn’t. I can still see her face as her gaze flicked between the picture and me. It was one enormous red flag. But I did what I always did with red flags, ignored it and plowed on through. I have no-one but myself to blame for an adolescence spent in hair hell.
It was only after I washed my hair myself (isn’t that always the way?) that I realised the enormity of what I’d done. My hair, thick and wiry, sat like a ginger hat on my head. I hated it and it hated me right back.
From 11 or 12 to 15 I tried everything. I went to bed with it wet - and woke up with it in clumps. I went to bed with it dry - ditto. I wore a scarf to bed to flatten it and woke up with it still lumpy but stuck flat to my head. I tried Shaders and Toners in a rich dark chestnut. It interacted with the ginger came out burgundy. I tried Sun-In. Think khaki. But, worst of all, my hair just wouldn’t grow past my ears. Or, more accurately, it would, but it grew out, not down. Every time I tried to get it past my ears it would reach triangle status and I’d crack and cry and get it all cut off again.
You’ll love it when you’re older, grown ups would endlessly say, of the colour and the waves. I know people who’d pay a fortune for hair like yours.
Teenage me would scowl. Teenage me didn’t give a monkeys about ‘when I was older’, all I cared about was right now and, right now, my short ginger hair that kinked in all the wrong directions was "ruining my life”.
Salvation came in the unlikely form of - wait for it - a perm! I know, I know. I know how ludicrous this sounds. Girl who hates her curly hair gets perm to make it… curlier. But this was, by then, the early 80s. Perms were everywhere (why be different!) and the hairdresser who regularly endured my woes insisted that making the curl look intentional would at least help me get the lumpy short bits past my ears.
Fast forward through many painful months - it worked! And to cut a long story short I never looked back. Except, just the once. There was an ill-advised break-up cut at university. (When the writer Kit de Waal (she of the exceedingly cool hair) came on The Shift with Sam Baker podcast we discovered we had lived around the corner from each other in Birmingham. When I told her I had had my hair cut off down the road in Sparkhill, she couldn’t stop laughing.)
Anyway, back to the story: I stomped down the road from my student house to the local hairdresser and announced that what I really needed was a bob. Yes, I know. Nobody with my jaw needs a bob, ever.
Now, any decent hairdresser would have taken one look and refused but, like I said, this was a random local hairdresser in inner city Birmingham (in the late 80s). Pretty soon, seven, eight inches hit the floor and an hour later the hairdresser span me around. There, in the mirror, was the hateful triangle of curly ginger hair. (Although, thankfully, still below my ears.) Too late now to stick it back on.
My friends kindly kept their opinions to themselves. Only one person – a girl in the same tutor group as me, her name was Erica, I’ll never forget it – looked me straight in the eye and said, “I preferred it long”.
Me too, Erica. Me too.
That was almost forty years ago now and I learnt my lesson good. I grew it and I grew it and apart from annual, at most, split ends removal, I’ve never looked back.
‘Hair is everything,’ said Fleabag (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) when her sister Claire (Sian Clifford) had a disastrous a-symmetrical crop that made her look like ‘a pencil’. ‘We wish it wasn’t so we could actually think about something else occasionally. But it it is. It’s the difference between a good day and a bad day…’
My teenage years were one, big – huge – bad hair day. But once I accepted that my hair is my hair is my hair and there’s not much I can do about it, other than wash it occasionally, all that changed. I could actually use all that energy to think about something else and get on with my life.
I can honestly say I have hardly had a bad hair day since. I don’t even think about it.
My hair, which I had always felt was my worst feature, slowly morphed into my best. As it grew and I stopped the endless battle with the curls and the ginger, it began to define me in a positive way.
The confidence sapper became the confidence giver. It entered the room before I did. I realised it didn’t much matter what I wore because what people saw when they looked at me was, frankly, a mane of ginger hair. (I hate hair euphemisms like ‘locks’ and ‘tresses’ but there really is no other word for it but mane.)
I remember talking to the fashion influencer Kat Farmer on The Shift with Sam Baker podcast. We were discussing accessories and I confided that I didn’t really know how to accessorise. ‘You don’t need to,’ Kat said. ‘Your hair is your accessory.’
‘Your hair is fabulous,’ I am frequently told, and I bask in its reflected glory. Nine times out of ten, the comment is followed up by ‘but how do you manage it? It must be a nightmare to look after.’
And that’s the most ironic thing of all. Long, my hair is the most low maintenance it’s ever been. It’s thick and dry so I wash it fortnightly. At most. (L’Oreal Elvive Dream Lengths Shampoo and Conditioner and 8 Second Wonder Water on the ends, if you’re interested). There’s a lot of it so, of course, It takes a while to wash, and those dry ends can really suck up the conditioner, but I’m pretty sure I don’t spend as much time washing my hair (or money on shampoo) as someone who washes theirs every couple of days.
Admittedly it does take hours to dry (hot tip: boucleme curl towel avoids roughing up the cuticles) but I just whack on some Moroccan Oil (not cheap but lasts all year) to tame the frizz then let it air dry and go about my day. (Blow dries are strictly for special occasions and then I go to a hairdresser and pay someone else’s arms to take the strain.) Otherwise, I never brush it because that would make it frizzy and I only tie it up when I go to the gym, in a big fat side-on plait so it doesn’t get tangled in the reformer.
Every so often, someone (usually a magazine editor who wants me to write about it, or a middle aged man with firm views about how women should age) will ask me when (not if) I’m going to cut it all off. Spoken or unspoken, that hair like mine is unseemly in a woman my age. That I missed some sort of memo that says women over 50 shouldn’t have long hair.
Well, you know where they can shove that! It took me too long to reach a point where I recognised the genetic blessing of my hair, I’m not letting it go now.
• All hair horror stories are extremely welcome!
*Btw, none of the links in this piece are affliliates.
Oh my goodness Sam, I loved this piece and can relate. I am 63 and still coloring my hair because I always loved being a ginger. I had the dreaded mullet in 7th grade, the Dorothy Hammill in 9th grade ( picture this haircut on a tall skinny teen with frizzy red hair…). Some above-shoulder frizz bomb haircut that I had while living in New York in the 80’s. Finally, in my late 20’s, I decided to grow it out and wore it long until 60, then I chopped it into a pixie like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. I actually loved it up until now because I was tired of being defined by my hair and I like how it feels, especially during our atrociously hot humid summers in Austin.
I was just in London on vacation and noticed many lovely older women with varying lengths of silvery white hair. And no, they weren’t wearing Talbots twin sets. All this babbling to say, many thanks for this piece. You have inspired me to grow my hair out again. The only decision left is to go gray or not..
Love this article. So relatable! My hair was short until I was 16 yo and genuinely grew outwards and upwards in a true 80's bouffant! I've embraced the whole range of hair dos over the years but allowing the wild locks to grow long and free is definitely the most liberating and easy to manage.