The heartbreak that day and in the weeks and months after was soothed by the knowledge that it never would have worked out with Constantine anyway. The rule—don’t date a guy who is as hair-obsessed as you are—exists for a reason. It simply won’t work. Sure, he has great hair and I have great hair, but when we eventually got serious enough to cohabit, where would we store our combined collection of hair products? There’s not a bathroom big enough in this world. My root boost spray will never be stored next to Constantine’s curl-separator serum, and that’s OK.
CHAPTER 5
RULE: Have a Blonde Mentor
Hair-wise, kids are sitting on a gold mine and they don’t even know it. Or rather, a gold mine is sitting on their heads and they don’t know. Children often have phenomenal natural color and exquisite natural highlights, yet they can’t even begin to appreciate those gifts because they don’t understand the intricacies of hair color and hair care. George Bernard Shaw said youth is wasted on the young, but I think a more fitting phrase is that good hair is wasted on the young. Due to this childhood ignorance of hair products and proper application, a hair mentor is a crucial ally for a young person.
I’ve been fortunate that throughout my life, I have received hair guidance and support from a blonde mentor: my mother, Susan. My two sisters, Laurel and Emily, are brown-haired, like my father, so my mother and I always had a blonde bond. Laurel, Emily, and my dad just couldn’t understand my mother’s and my addiction to pale-blue shirts and purple shampoo. Throughout those rough years of adolescence, my mother taught me a lot about life and also, more importantly, about overconditioning. During sixth grade I was addicted to Salon Selectives products, and I’d use dollops of shampoo and conditioner in equal measure. My shower routine was that I’d shampoo my full head, then condition my full head; then, once I dried my hair post-shower, it would appear to be filthier than it was before I even began the whole exercise. My mother was flabbergasted as to how my hair could look perpetually dirty (those were tough times in Selena hair history), and I was clueless about the nuances of conditioner and fine hair. Finally, she sat me down and asked what I was doing in the shower—how was it possible that I could wash my hair and yet be unable to clean my hair? I explained my system and my mother imparted some brilliant advice: Slathering your head with conditioner, from root to tip, will undo any washing that you just did.
“But I want my hair to be soft and conditioner makes it soft,” I explained.
“But this is too much of a good thing. What you have now is beyond soft and downright dirty all over again.” Aha. I, the young ninja, finally understood the prophecy: condition, but only on the ends of your hair. My blonde mentor mother had saved the day by saving my hair.
Every young blonde should have a blonde mentor to keep her away from Sun-In and school her on the intricacies of proper conditioner application—that is, a blonde mentor to keep a young towhead on the proper platinum track. My beautiful mother is an ashy blonde contrast to my brassy blonde ways, and she has always provided me with essential balance and crucial hair care advice.
My mother was something of a hair chameleon throughout my childhood: different cuts, occasional perms, but always ashy blonde highlights. Still, her exemplary hair record includes a few catastrophes since she herself lacked a blonde mentor (her mother was an auburn-haired knockout who didn’t understand Susan’s ashy-haired aspirations). My mother gave me a breakdown of her worst blonde incidents and I share them here, in Susan’s own words.
1960—Peroxide Portside
My parents gave me a present of a seventeen-day cruise from Venice to New York City when I was sixteen. Since I was alone, it was not much fun and rather scary. But I thought that I would make the trip more interesting if I became a blonde. Since my redheaded mother would not have understood this at all, this trip was the perfect time for me to experiment without her presence. I bought a small bottle of peroxide, and in the little sink in my stateroom, I poured and dabbed it on my hair, thinking that somehow the dabbing would be enough and transfer blondeness across my entire head. In my fantasy, I would turn into Marilyn Monroe instantaneously. In reality, my hair was still mousy brown with splotches of white here and there. I looked like I was wearing a polka-dot wig. Even I knew that this experiment had not gone according to plan.
When my parents met me at the ship, my mother had a predictable reaction. There was no screaming, just a set mouth and a determined manner: “Tomorrow I am taking you to my hairdresser, who will straighten out this mess.” Mother went to a small salon on the West Side to get what she called her “touch-ups.” They covered her white roots with auburn hair color so that she could once again become a youthful-looking redhead.
Dad called Mother’s salon “the Cell” because he laughingly accused the owners and the clientele of sympathizing with all things Communist. So I dutifully went, listening for subversive talk but hearing none. But my hair did return to its mousy-brown natural state.
1967—Streaking in Montreal
I was in Montreal working at Expo 67, the World’s Fair. I had seen pictures in magazines of models with beautifully streaked or highlighted hair that looked natural and subtle. I thought that I explained adequately what I wanted at the salon, but les mèches (the highlights) that I got were true, thick stripes of light- and dark-GRAY hair. I looked like I was wearing a gray pinstripe suit on my head. This experience gave me a scary preview of what I would look like in forty years—if I let nature take its course, which I had no intention of doing. Not after what I had seen! The remedy for incidents one and two was to have my hair dyed brown to cover the blonde and gray errors. Grrr—thwarted again and again in my attempt to be a blonde.
1969—Cambridge Ring Around the Roots
Once again I thought that I had explained what I wanted, even going so far as to show a picture: “See! See! This is what I want.” Well, you know what is coming. This time my hair looked like straw with an interesting orange corona around my face. I felt like a medieval monk with a bad tonsure, thinking weighty thoughts like, “Where can I hide my head so no one can see me?” After that incident, there was nothing to do but wait. My hair was too damaged to dye it some more.
Thankfully, after that Cambridge “monk look” debacle, my mother met a good colorist and then, in short order, a good man (my father, Michael).23 My mother did her best to help me through the trials and tribulations of life as a young blonde, destined to be awarded “Best Hair” from Weston High School in 1998. She did make a few missteps, though, when she caved into my and my sisters’ childhood pleas and let us get perms. Many, many perms. The worst of which was something called a “nonchemical” natural perm. (Umm . . . if you’re not going to use chemicals to will this straight hair curly, then exactly what are you going to use?) Laurel, Emily, and I lined up for that new type of perm, hoping to have bouncy, 1980s-style curls, but what we got was much worse. “It took all of the shine out of your hair,” my mother recalls. “It looked like something was dead on top of your head.” My mother got a bad perm at the same salon herself. She went in for a regular perm and came out with an Afro puff, which prompted my father to call the salon and yell at them, asking, “How could you do this?” What can I say? The Coppock family has a lot of hair drama.
It’s nice to know that even my blonde mentor experienced some bumps and detours along the way to hair glory. My mother doesn’t have time to act as your personal hair mentor, dear reader—she’s got her hands full keeping me away from overconditioning. But she’s willing to share some of the tips that she has learned over the course of a lifetime of blondeness.
Don’t be afraid to have one hairdresser cut your hair and another hairdresser color it. My mother has almost always had one person who does her cut and another who does her color. She has honed in on the specialty of a hairdresser and shopped around to get exactly what she wants. Sure, having one hairdresser do the cut and a colorist at a different salon do your color can be a time-consuming and expensive endeavor, but do
you want good hair or not?
Try, try, try to explain ashy vs. brassy so that you don’t end up on the wrong side of the blonde spectrum. As I mentioned before, my mother’s mother was a natural redhead—auburn hair and porcelain skin—so my mother has a lot of red in her pigment already, which can lead to brassy color if the colorist isn’t careful. If the color is too warm, my mother insists that her head looks like orange-yellow Velveeta cheese—not the look she wants. She likes her hair to be a sleek whitish blonde (unlike my preferred brassy shade), and when she tries out a colorist for the first time, she makes it a point to explain this difference and her own knowledge of her red pigmentation. When the colorist makes her adequately ashy, she looks fantastic. When the colorist somehow leads her to brassiness, poor Mom has a mac-and-cheese head.
Bring a photo. Don’t feel corny pulling out a photo or magazine cutout. If you were having a pair of shoes dyed to exactly match your dress, you would bring a fabric swatch of the exact color, wouldn’t you? Well, your hair is no different—bring a point of reference. Also, please never do that matching dress-and-shoes combo—the 1980s are over.
Follow a good hairdresser wherever he/she may go. Even if he/she talks too much. Finding a hairdresser who does your cut or color just the way you like it is a herculean task. So if you’re fortunate enough to find a good hairdresser, stick with her. Even if she chats more than you’d like. Even if she moves to a salon that’s an hour drive from your home—make the journey. Do you want convenience, or do you want hair that makes people do a double take? Once you find a good hairdresser, follow her to the ends of the earth.
Don’t snap your gum. Doing that makes you look trashy. (For more of these gems, check out Chapter 11.)
Heed the wise words of my mother, Susan—a lifelong blonde, my icon of blondeness, and my invaluable blonde mentor.
PART TWO
Blonde Maintenance
CHAPTER 6
RULE: Natural Blondes Must Wear Sunscreen
The California girl archetype is deeply entrenched in American pop culture history: She’s lean, tan, laid-back, and topped with a head of naturally sun-kissed blonde hair. The Beach Boys built an empire on this character, and Baywatch sold it to the American public and beyond (Germans love their Hasselhoff). If there’s one thing that the 1980s taught us, it was the crucial lesson that to be a desirable blonde, you had to have a great tan and a pair of red pumps (if every hair band video is to be believed). The nerd archetype, on the other hand, is grounded in that character’s complete inability to achieve a tan. The Police Academy films, the Revenge of the Nerds franchise, and ’80s teen films with poolside scenes almost always featured a pasty nerd character whose gangly arms were adorned with water wings and whose nose was covered in zinc oxide. The message of ’80s cinema for adolescents was clear: Nerds wear sunscreen and are clueless about aquatics; cool people tan and swim well.
I grew up watching Baywatch somewhat religiously and viewing an inordinate number of tan blonde women running down California beaches in slow motion. These tan blondes were either running in slow-mo to make a rescue (Pamela Anderson, Nicole Eggert, Donna D’Errico), or they were making bad decisions beachside (only to be saved by David Hasselhoff’s legendary character, Mitch Buchannon and that one brunette lifeguard lady who had A cups and actual lifeguard skills). Thanks to Baywatch, my young mind eternally linked blonde hair and tan skin. Blondes were tan—that’s simply how it went.
Throughout my childhood summers, every morning before day camp, my mother would dutifully slather me in SPF 15, ruining my chances of ever becoming a tan, slow-mo-running Baywatch babe. (Note: This was before parents started coating their kids in SPF 600 to the point that now kids have vitamin D deficiencies. SPF 15 was considered pretty hard-core during the era of Kids Incorporated and Milli Vanilli.) I needed my mother to ease up on the sunblock application so that I could achieve the sun-kissed look that I saw on TV and desperately wanted to mimic in my own life.
“Mom, I have blonde hair. I shouldn’t wear all this sunblock. I should be getting tan like the women on Baywatch,” I would explain, using the brilliant logic of an eight-year-old who just wants to stop being teased with the nickname Whiteout.
“Selena, those women aren’t natural blondes,” she’d respond. She then leveled with me as to why I possessed natural blonde hair and the pigmentation of a corpse as I clutched my jelly bag and stood there, quaking in my jelly shoes.
“Our family is Irish, English, and Scottish. We are fair-skinned and have light hair and blue eyes, and we’ll never get tan like the women that you see on TV. They’re probably Italian or Greek and color their hair blonde, but their hair is really brown when they don’t color it,” she said.
Huh? The women on Baywatch weren’t paragons of natural beauty? My young mind couldn’t come to grips with this harsh reality. First I learn that Santa’s not real, now the cast of Baywatch is revealed to be bottle blondes! Next you’ll tell me that their breasts have been surgically enhanced or something completely inconceivable and insane like that! Is nothing sacred? I didn’t understand it. In my mind, blonde hair and the ability to become tan were intertwined. One went with the other, just like peanut butter and jelly, or Laverne and Shirley, or water parks and the unwashed masses. Getting my nascent brain around the fact that these women were completely fake and that tan skin and blonde hair weren’t naturally correlated was like trying to explain existential philosophy to a toddler. It just didn’t compute.
But my fair-skinned and fair-haired brethren should not be ashamed of their look—the stereotype of the bronzed blonde is unrealistic for many natural blondes, as I eventually realized. Pasty ladies should be proud of their porcelain complexions and not feel like they must submit to the platinum-haired, tan-skinned, California girl stereotype. There are multitudes of fair-skinned knockouts in entertainment and fashion: Amanda Seyfried, Scarlett Johansson, Robyn, Taylor Swift, Dakota Fanning, Michelle Williams, Cate Blanchett, Emma Stone, Courtney Love, and many more. These ladies are gorgeous, possess porcelain complexions, and wear their fairness with pride. They don’t layer on bronzer and tanning cream to fit in with the characters from Jersey Shore. They cover up on the beach, slather on the sunscreen, and almost never wrinkle. For their inspirational self-acceptance and confidence in the face of a bronzed world, I admire these porcelain princesses.
However, I am unable to be like them. I cannot resist the siren call of the “healthy” tan, and so I have perfected a method to make even the pastiest, palest blonde a bronze, blonde goddess (or at least a less-than-paper-white goddess). You need not be banished to a life as an assumed Goth kid who is allergic to sunlight. My naturally fair-haired brothers and sisters, I decree that you can still wear some sunblock and get a bit of color nonetheless. My blonde bestie, Suzanne, and I developed a strategy for maximizing melanin. Hold on to your socks.
How to “Tan” as a Pasty Girl
I don’t like the nickname, but I have been called a pasty girl on more than one occasion. A few years back, Suzanne and I took a trip to Las Vegas, where we befriended a bachelor party over drinks at the Palms Casino Resort’s Playboy Club. They were nice guys, but they promptly nicknamed us “the Pasties” (and it wasn’t a reference to nipple covers). The guys said that it was a term of endearment, but if you’ve ever endured playground teasing about your fair skin, you know how harsh that nickname can feel. We rolled with the punches, though—hell, this crew was buying drinks and spending money like finance guys circa 2007. But Suzanne and I knew what we had in our back pocket on that trip: an extensively researched sunbathing formula to fight that nickname and be, in fact, less pasty.
People will tell you that on vacation, you should slather on the SPF 30 or SPF 60, wear a hat, not hit the beach between the hours of eleven a.m. and two p.m., and generally have your “beach vacation” include as little beach time as possible. This need not be the case! Do not listen to these losers!24 You should not return from a tropical island looking like you spent
a week in front of a computer beneath fluorescent lights, working eighteen-hour days of computer programming. Ladies and gentlemen, I shall now reveal my secret weapon: SPF 8.
You’re thinking, SPF 8? What, is this the 1960s and people are using reflective mirrors and baby oil to maximize their tans? This author may have a sick weave, as I saw in the author photo, but what is she thinking? I’m thinking that everyone looks healthier with a bit of color, unhealthy though it may be. I’m thinking that when I was a kid, my rich peers would go to the Caribbean during February school vacation (while I spent five straight days putzing around our local mall) and come back oozing a sense of relaxation, health, and wealth. I’m thinking that there is no reason to act like you are allergic to sunlight. (Unless you really are allergic, in which case, please skip to the next chapter and do not heed my advice. I have no idea what I’m talking about, OK?. . . Are those pasty sun allergy kids gone? Good, now listen up!)
SPF 8 is like manna from heaven. It usually comes in a brown bottle (because it technically qualifies as “tanning lotion” on the sunscreen continuum), which looks a hell of a lot cooler in your beach bag than a stark white bottle of SPF 3000. You’re getting cooler by the minute, reader! Sunblock should never be applied beachside or poolside, if possible. It’s much easier to get a uniform layer of sunblock on your entire body if you apply it while you’re still indoors, before you go out in the sun. That way, you can spread the sunblock on your entire body and not worry about missing spots or getting burned near your bikini straps or edges. Also, if it’s done in private, strangers don’t awkwardly observe you rubbing down your entire body (back of thighs! ears! tops of feet!). Private application is a win-win for everyone. Once you’re coated in SPF 8 and have assembled the requisite beach accoutrements—chair that can recline (to avoid tiger stripes on your stomach), Us Weekly (People and In Touch are also acceptable, but NOT Time or The Economist or anything remotely informative), snacks, and iced Dunkin’ Donuts coffee25 you are ready to hit the beach.
The New Rules for Blondes Page 5