{"id":4476,"date":"2016-07-04T08:00:42","date_gmt":"2016-07-04T08:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/?p=4476"},"modified":"2016-07-02T21:17:24","modified_gmt":"2016-07-02T21:17:24","slug":"extreme-hairdressing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/?p=4476","title":{"rendered":"Extreme Hairdressing"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Struwwelpeter\/Marcelo<\/a>

Struwwelpeter\/Marcelo Trasel\/flickr<\/p><\/div>\n

The most exciting hairdressing experience I ever had was in a small town in Italy. The smooth-haired have no idea of the torments of the frizzy on holiday. The choice is between carting tongs or a hood hairdryer with you, flattening your wet hair under a sunhat and hoping the sun comes out so you don\u2019t look like too much of a prat, or resigning yourself to getting about with a Brillo pad on your head.<\/p>\n

Anyway, in this medieval town deep in Umbria I came across a true blow-dry diva. Her establishment was good enough to accommodate me at short notice, but she was not going to give up her lunch on my account, so as she wielded dryer and brush with the sort of brio one would expect from a Donatella Versace look-alike, one of her acolytes held out a large slice of pizza, which she would from time to time tear chunks out of with her teeth, never missing a beat in her brush-dry-brush-dry rhythm.\u00a0 The results were outstanding: hair straight and silky, yet volumised like a bouncy dandelion.<\/p>\n

Did I mind having to share her attention with a slice of pizza in greasy brown paper? Not a bit of it. A hairdresser would have to go a long way to outdo the Shampoo<\/em>-style cowboy who gave me my first perm. \u2018Who did this?, he inquired, picking contemptuously at strands of my hair. Six hours later I emerged looking like a King Charles spaniel.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t think I don\u2019t feel for hairdressers, though \u2013 on their feet all day, etc. Life was so much easier in the days of the shampoo and set. You could always have a couple of ladies roasting under the dryer while you got on with other things. They just need a bit of a comb-out and backcomb once they were done to a crisp, and then they were on their way. Not so with blow-drying, and now as often as not you have to add tonging to the labour-intensive \u2018face time\u2019. My classically trained hairdresser of 20+ years reckoned that the number of clients you could do in a day halved once blow-drying came in. She can recall a rigorous and lengthy training led by an ex-army officer who could wave a head of hair just by curling the tresses over his hand as he dried it, supplemented by week-long colouring and perming schools offered by all the great names in \u2018product\u2019.<\/p>\n

But all the appliances and product in the world will not protect the wild-haired from the embarrassment their wilful crowning glory can expose them to. Can a straight-haired person really imagine what it is like to go out in the morning with a lovely straight fringe, only to realise on looking in the mirror later that some time in the intervening three hours your forehead has sprouted a handsomely curled handlebar moustache?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

. . . getting about with a Brillo pad on your head . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4479,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,55,53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4476"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4476"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4481,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4476\/revisions\/4481"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}