Beauty Rituals

I saw a post on Facebook earlier in the week that reminded me of hairstyles when I was a kid. I have always had short hair. For whatever reason I have never been able to grow my hair to any length. I am blessed with really thick hair which just gets thicker not longer.

Anyway as a a kid Mum would often have a go at cutting our hair particularly our fringes. Now when this happened they were always on a slant and when dad got home he would straighten them up and the fringe would be extremely short and still crooked. These hair cutting events would invariably happen around school photo time and in order to hide the crooked fringe Mum would pin it all back of the forehead and plonk a bow on top. In those days I really wanted to have long hair but sadly that was not to be. Having been reminded about this it got me thinking about other things our mothers did to our hair and the things we did to ourselves in the name of beauty.

There were the curling tongs. These were a similar in shape to the modern day curling tongs but of course were not connected to electricity. Mum would heat them on the flame of the gas stove then when they heated she would apply them to our hair to produce curls. Now having been afflicted with “hair as straight as sticks” it never really worked to give a curl just a frizzy bit on the end. If you happened to move your head during this process then you would have a burn on the place the tongs would contact. And the smell of burning hair would pervade the house for many hours.

Then there was rag curls. This also met with limited success with my straight hair. Mum would spend hours wrapping our hair around pieces of rag before we would go to be and in the morning we were meant to be transformed into a Shirley Temple look alike. My younger sister had long hair (which I always envied) and her hair would have some semblance of curl. Mine on the other hand would just be sticking out at odd angles all over my head.

Kiss curls were fad of my teenage years. I would spend a great deal of time in front of the mirror pinning my hair in bobby pins to achieve a perfect look of kiss curls framing my face. By the time I perfected this technique. kiss curls had gone out of fashion and sweeping bangs were the order of the day. This is something that I could achieve with relative ease, having thick hair and the right cut…Cilla Black was popular at the time and we all aspire to look like her with sweeping side bangs and a full fringe. Hair rollers were sometimes needed to achieve this look for special occasions when you wanted a more dramatic effect. So you would wind your hair around these massive rollers and stick pins in them and off you would go to bed for a very restless night of trying to get comfortable despite the hardware prodding your scalp. When the rollers came out you would spray your hair with lacquer….a substance that made your hair feel like toffee and could withstand a tropical cyclone. The lacquer came in a clear glass bottle with a pump atomiser attached. Mothers were great users of rollers for themselves. Many a mother would be seen at the shops on a Saturday morning or at confession on a Saturday afternoon with the hair in rollers covered by a colourful scarf in preparation for a night out or Mass on Sunday morning. The scarves were gaily coloured, often souvenir scarves with greetings from Port Macquarie or Tasmania emblazoned on them.

Home perms were popular as well in my teenage years. Again the job of rolling the hair fell to Mum….end papers would be applied, foul smelling lotion would be applied and then you would wait for some time for it to take effect and the result would be curly until you had to wash it then it transformed into a mass of frizz.

I had a friend in my teenage years who had long blonde hair. She was so lucky as she was able to use a mauve rinse called Magic Silver White to give her locks a mauve tint. Before we would go out on Saturday nights she would iron her hair so it would be straight. Hair Straighteners had not even been thought of back then.

Another friend tells the story of her mother using a solution of sugar and water when she was a little girl to keep her hair in place. This story always gives me a vision of flies and ants following her around as she went about her childhood activities.

It is great times have changed in relation to these beauty routines but we have lost something in that we sometimes miss out on one-on-one mother/daughter bonding that was a part of these rituals.