I lingered inside the door of the hair salon, watching a sudden downpour soak the street. I’d just done what I once swore I’d never do: paid someone $50 to blow-dry my naturally unruly curls smooth and nearly straight. I had no umbrella. So the receptionist offered a sheet of white plastic to protect the blow-dry as I dashed to my car. I hesitated. The plastic was, unmistakably, a white Glad bag, complete with signature red drawstring. I put the garbage bag over my head, pulled it low enough to cover my hair without risking suffocation, and walked down Wisconsin Avenue at rush hour laughing.
It was an Afghanistan moment.
I once lived and worked in Afghanistan for some months as a journalist. Grateful daily not to have stepped on a land mine or driven over an IED, I had a mantra: If I still have both my hands and feet, it’s a good day.
Back home in Bethesda, I often have what I think of as Afghanistan moments. These are the times I’m struck by the absurd minutia that we-the-geographically-lucky can afford to define as problems—a parking ticket or a soldout movie, Trader Joe’s running out of organic French roast coffee beans or a blow-dry ruined in the rain.
My most recent Afghanistan moment left me wondering what women in that country would make of a $50 blow-dry, with its ephemeral attainment of what passes for perfect hair in parts of Bethesda and places like it. Then I remembered. Once at a wedding in Kabul in 2003, I’d watched women arrive draped in blueberry-hued burqas. Behind the doors of the segregated hall reserved for female guests, these women lifted away their burqas to reveal Bollywood-inspired evening gowns and coiffures teased and sprayed into perfect 1960s-style beehives. Not a hair out of place.
Across cultures and eras, women’s hair has been imbued with social meaning, usually tangled up with issues of freedom, sexuality and power. If you haven’t read any of the myriad anthropological treatises on the subject or watched Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair, think Rapunzel or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “The most important thing I have to say today is that hair matters,” Clinton once quipped during a speech at Yale University. “…Pay attention to your hair. Because everyone else will.”
Some scientists theorize that human beings have such large brains in part because tracking vast amounts of social information—such as who gathers the best berries and where they find them—has helped us survive. Disdain it if you will, but some of that social information is about hair. (I wish I didn’t know that Jennifer Aniston’s stylist uses a blowdryer, not a flat iron, to achieve her iconic smooth locks, or that a team of professional stylists buff Kim Kardashian’s high-gloss every day before she leaves home. But while I’m hunting and gathering at the grocery store, that information leaps unbidden off magazine covers and lodges uncomfortably in my brain.)
In communities like this, where people can afford to give in to the gravitational pull of Kim Kardashian’s hair, many women visit hair salons once or twice weekly and pay $35 to $55 to have professional stylists blow-dry their hair reality-show smooth. At least until they have to go home and confront the reality of a steaming dishwasher or a boiling pot of pasta.
Carlos Garzon, owner of Salon Privé in Bethesda, has one regular client so protective of her blow-dry that she went on a family beach vacation and refused to dip her head into the ocean. “You are obviously there on a beach vacation to enjoy and relax,” Garzon says. “But this particular person really wanted to protect her hair from getting curly or frizzy. She has a high position in the government.”
That sounds like a non sequitur, but it’s not. A recent documentary about legendary New York Times street photographer Bill Cunningham makes the point that fashion is the armor people put on to help them face the reality of their daily lives.
If fashion is armor, then a blow-dry makes a pretty good helmet.
On any given Friday or Saturday morning, dozens of women are at Hair by Paabo, a downtown Bethesda hair salon, getting their helmets on.
“I could be out in a windstorm and every hair just falls back in place,” says Ann Schwartz of Potomac. She’s such a regular customer that she never does her own hair, and doesn’t own a blowdryer. “You couldn’t pay me to blowdry my own hair,” she says. “Holding my arms up above my head for so long—to me, that’s like being crucified.”
Schwartz is so proud of her perma-sleek professional blow-dry that she carries a baggie filled with Hair by Paabo cards in her handbag. “I consider it a slow day when only three people stop me and ask me where I get my hair done,” she says.
Soraya Rubin, a Chevy Chase fashion consultant who has her wavy hair smoothed out at Hair by Paabo every Saturday, doesn’t know anyone who has stopped getting professional blow-dries because of the economic downturn. “I’d do whatever it took to get my hair done,” she says. “When my hair doesn’t look right, I’m not confident. …I feel undone.”
Women who love their blow-dries are loathe to have them undone. Hair by Paabo co-owner Bonnie Henry Cohen recalls a rainy day when several blow-dry customers planning to attend the same social event that night were surprised by a rainstorm. “We put white trash bags on everybody, with holes for their eyes cut out,” she says. “We marched seven or eight of them across the courtyard to the elevator that way. They looked like they were the Klan.”
The fervor of Bethesda’s blow-dry culture was a bit of a shock to Renee Emminger, a German living here temporarily while her husband is on assignment for the German government. In Germany, women tend to prize natural looks, she says; even famous actresses attending Germany’s most prestigious awards shows don’t arrive similarly buffed, polished and coiffed. “In Germany, if women have curly hair, they wear curly hair,” she says. “If they don’t like makeup, they don’t wear it. German women do their own thing more.”
That doesn’t mean Emminger doesn’t enjoy a little acculturation with her Bethesda blow-dry. She beams as her Hair by Paabo stylist spins her around so she can check out the back of her fresh blow-dry. “It’s perfect—like snow untouched,” she says.
Then Emminger notices one blond lock out of place. “Actually,” she asks her stylist sweetly, “can you do that one little piece a bit more?”
April Witt, an award-winning journalist, lives in Bethesda. Send comments or column ideas to aprilwitt@hotmail.com.
