WEARING YOUR MID LIFE CRISIS....On Your Head

It was Coco Chanel who said that a woman who cuts her hair is about to change her life.  This may or may not be true.  But what is very true is that a woman’s relationship with her hair goes way beyond the obvious.  It is a deeply intense bond that proclaims something to the world about the woman’s inner life.

I remember well my first proper hairstyle.  The first time I ever went to a hair stylist.  I think I was about ten.  Before this my dear mother, who is gifted in many things but not hairdressing, used to give me the classic pudding bowl cut complete with wonky fringe that was de rigour for children in Ireland in the 1970s.  So it was a big deal to be given the two pence ha’penny or whatever it was to take myself off to the local hairdressers for a proper hairstyle.  A bob. A heavy fringe and curtain of beautifully styled hair with a turn under for added bounce.  I was gorgeous.  I didn’t just think I was gorgeous I FELT gorgeous.

The early 80’s ushered in the era of the perm.  I achieved my own unique version of the poodle, with a straight hair on the top of my head (because I was – and still am - very tall) and full curly sides.  This look involved spending hours with foul smelling stuff on my head (it did actually make my eyes water) in a trendy salon on Baggot St.  I knew it was trendy because Gillian Bowler, who was then selling sexy holidays to Greece was also a regular client – although she never went for a perm as far as I know!  Her long, luscious locks cascaded around her face from the permanent sunglasses perched on her head, winter and summer.

By the end of that decade I was a single parent and decided I required a kind of ‘don’t fuck with me’ hairstyle which was a short back and sides.  I hoped it would make me look like a strong woman.  In reality I looked like a lanky boy.  

In the 90’s I met a man I liked and got married.  My look softened along with my heart and I splashed out on blonde highlights. This marked the first time I tinkered with the colour of my hair  – well unless you include the dabbling with Henna in the late 70s.

The wedding highlights were just beginning to fade when the grey hair started to be an issue. Marriage, huh?  Anyway I added a box of Clairol that looked vaguely similar to my own colour, to my supermarket shopping and did a home job.  But the toll on the bathroom was immense; splashes of brown on tiles, on the loo, on the sink and not to mention to ruined towels. 

In spite of my efforts the grey continued its relentless march.  Tougher action was called for.

So began the visit to the local salon every two months to ‘have my colour done’.  Two hours to read trashy magazines and wonder about celebrity life styles after which I bounced back out to my life with a shiny ageless head of beautifully blow dried hair. 

Then two months become six weeks and now we are down to one month.  And I am beginning to fear that I am losing this battle. 

Now let me state clearly the obvious.  And that is that while my hair has been succumbing to my great age – so has the rest of me.  I have lines on my forehead and wrinkles around my eyes and mouth.  My chin has trebled and my jaw line is slack.  And that’s just my face.  But somehow I can live with all of that.  In fact I come close to believing that my face now has character.  My lines and wrinkles speak of tears shed through both sorrow and sheer joy.  And in the right light – fairly dark light, let it be said – I look, well, kind of reasonable.  No siree - no botox or fillers or any of that rubbish for me. 

But my hair lets me down every time those grey roots start to appear.  Immediately I look (with all due respects to her) like my 80 year old mother. 

The recession hasn’t helped.  There have been months when I have taken pity on the dog whose nails are scraping on the floor and who trips over his own long hair and taken him to the groomers with my hair money.  Sure what will another couple of weeks matter, I ask myself. Oh but it does matter.  Once those grey roots appear all around my face, I notice people talking to my hair rather than to me.  I keep catching sight of myself in shop windows or mirrors and wondering why my aforementioned mother has joined me.

Last summer my hairdresser gently suggested that I might like to start to lighten my hair colour a little.  This would make the appearance of grey roots a little less obvious.  But I wasn’t happy.  My hair had never been light brown.  It didn’t match my eyebrows.  I didn’t feel like me. 

So I decided that I should do something radical with my hair.  Purple, I thought to myself.  I’ll dye my hair purple.  Deep Purple – not that Kelly Osborne washed out purple... but proper purple.   That would be very rock ‘n’ roll. 

So next visit to my beleaguered hairdressers I informed them of my wish to go purple, proper purple.  They tried to politely dissuade me.  But I insisted.  They said they didn’t really have the purple I wanted in stock.  Sure maybe I should think about it. 

I did.  I asked them just to give me a trim and blow dry and on the way home I picked up a colour from the supermarket.  My first attempt turned out a bit red rather than purple.  But I preserved – for the last six months I have been various shades of red and pink – usually at the same time.  I never achieved the purple I envisaged.  My hair was a bit of a mess.

But here’s the thing about one’s hair.  Unless you really, truly care, you only really pay attention to what’s framing your face.  So I was pretty unaware of how weird my colour was until I travelled half way around the world recently to holiday with my emigrant daughter whose first job was in a hairdressers.

“Jesus Ma, you’re hair’s great craic – it’s brown, grey, pink and red.”  To make matters worse, the climate in Bali is very humid and so my multicoloured barnet also frizzed out in all directions.  I finally realised I did indeed look a holy show. 

In desperation I sent a message to my long suffering local hairdressers begging them for an appointment on the way back from the airport. 

“I think I might lighten my hair... “ I muttered sheepishly.  “For the summer, like.”    

The colourist looked at my poor sun bleached, dry, multicoloured hair. 

“We didn’t do this, did we?” she asked.

“No.  I did”

“Right.  Well there is no quick fix.  Killing that red tone is going to take a bit of time.  We will have to go a bit darker before we can lighten it.  Otherwise you will just have pink highlights.”

Pink highlights?  For a minute, I wondered.   

But I think I am over my hair proclaiming my personal mid life crisis.  I am ready to move on!   I think.....

HAPPY HALLOWEEN TO ALL WITCHES

The cover of the Culture Magazine of The Sunday Times last weekend caught me attention as it featured a stunning photo of Dame Judi Dench who is currently starring in the movie ‘Philomena’ which opened recently in cinemas in Ireland.  Amid the sea of perfectly enhanced faces we normally see on the cover of magazines Ms Dench’s portrait is refreshingly beautiful in what I hope is an honest way.   

There is currently an ad on TV which begins by a woman announcing that she is growing old gracefully to her friend who in turn says that she would like to grow old disgracefully.  There are a number of women in the conversation mentioning things like glowing from within.  However just about the time that you the viewer is harbouring an inner glow in the hope that this is another refreshingly honest take on older women – they mention some bloody serum that ‘really works’.  A fact they know because of the ‘second looks’ they get.  Ta Dah... plus ca change?

The message stays the same – women must fight ageing all the way and remember that our worth is entirely dependent on how good, i.e. youthful we look.  The results of this ‘war on ageing’ can be seen every week on The X Factor as Ms Osborne resorts to jumping about a lot to make up for the fact that her face is not quite as mobile as it should be.  Madonna is another example of someone who is maybe winning the war on ageing by beginning to look extraordinary... anyone remember the series from the 80s called V (about reptilian people).  And then there is or was Cher... well.  I rest my case.

My husband is a photographer and he often says that women who have ‘had work done’ (God be with the days when that meant the addition of a conservatory) might look young from a distance but that up close they scare the bejaysus out of him.  

It’s beyond time that real women (who like me, even if I could afford ‘work’ I am way more afraid of looking odd than looking old) took a stand and retrieved women’s middle and senior years as being just as valid as their youth.

In ancient mythology woman was represented by the Triple Goddess of The Maiden, The Mother and The Crone.  The triple spiral found in ancient Ireland is said to be a representation of triumvirate view of woman.  The maiden was of course revered for her physical youth and beauty, the mother respected as the nurturer and carer.  And the Crone was respected for her wisdom.  But it was this wise and powerful woman, this Crone that became hijacked over the centuries to become the evil witch capable of knowing the unknown and of dastardly deeds.  By the middle ages she was a witch with evil powers but at least she had power.  In today’s society the older woman has been reduced to nothing.  Age is seen as entirely negative and we must fight to remain young....  to the point of cutting and pasting of our faces.

British actress Kristin Scott Thomas who is 53 spoke this summer about how she feels invisible and not just when she is in the company of younger co-stars but even walking down the street or among strangers.  And if someone as well known, as accomplished an actress, as beautiful as Ms Scott Thomas feels like that what about the rest of us?

Ageing is seen by modern society as failure, particularly for women.  And it seems to me that modern, older women are content to accept this as fact and to undergo surgery and injecting poisons in order to attempt to delay the inevitable?   This fact depresses me far more than noticing my lines and wrinkles.

Tomorrow we celebrate the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain.  Samhain marked the end of the harvest but it is also the time when we celebrate the Goddess as Crone. 

So amid the mayhem and madness this is time for older women to retrieve their true power.  We are in many ways at the pinnacle of our real power.  We have been around the block a few times; we have lived, perhaps given birth and raised children.  We have worked, we have loved, we have cried and we have laughed.  We have gathered wisdom and stories along the way.

The Crone stage is not the end.  It is a new beginning.  It is time women to step into your power, don your witch’s hat and scream it from the rooftops.  WE ARE WISE POWERFUL WOMEN...as for invisible... only if you allow yourself to be.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN....

BANNING CHILD BEAUTY PAGEANTS - LETS NOT FOOL OURSELVES

So Ireland’s first Child Beauty Pageant went ahead in the end..... in a pub in Monaghan.  Not quite the glamorous venue I am sure the organisers had hoped for.. with all due respect to Monaghan pubs.  So now the question must be ‘should Ireland follow France and ban these pageants altogether?’

Personally I am fearful that if we do,  we will then sit back on our laurels in typical Irish fashion and congratulate ourselves on the fact that ‘we don’t hold with that kind of thing here’; allowing us to bathe in a false sense as to how we value our children and protect them from sexualisation and exploitation.

There are three problems I see with Child Beauty Pageants.. and no I have never been to one.  I am making my assumptions based on the reality programmes such as Toddlers and Tiaras and on the interview with participants and organisers on the Late Late Show on Friday night.

Firstly is the application of spray tan, false nails, hair pieces, false eyelashes etc on very small children.  To me this is borderline abuse.  I am not sure it is ever right to apply spray tan to a child under 12 years of age, regardless of the event.

Second is the issue (which I have only seen on the American reality shows about pageants) of pushing small children well beyond their physical limits.  Keeping them awake when they are clearly exhausted is bad enough but feeding them energy drinks is another issue altogether and another possible abuse.

But thirdly and most worrying is the sexualisation of young girls that is part and parcel of these competitions.  This is where the real problem lies and this was the issue Senator Jillian Van Turnout continually highlighted in her successful campaign to have hotels refuse to host last weekend’s competition here in Ireland.

But the sexualisation of children in the pageant world is just the cartoon, thin end of the wedge.  My children have never wanted to be involved in a beauty pageant.  They enjoy the reality shows because of the drama involved.  But they, like most young girls, have never harboured any ambitions to wear a tiara themselves. 

However these same young girls (now teenagers) are far more likely to be impacted by the constant but much more subtle message that is carried across all our media that a girl or woman’s worth is measured primarily by her appearance and the pinnacle of attractiveness is to be sexually attractive.

We seem to be fast asleep to this much more damaging aspect of modern life certainly her in the so called civilised Western World.  The sexualisation of our children is taking place in our own living rooms, every day of the year.  It is a message carried in music videos, in movies and in advertising.  In fact it is increasingly subtly hidden in mainstream news media too. 

Don’t believe me?  Have a look at this - the trailer for a very disturbing documentary called Miss Representation.  No matter what a woman’s achievements, her worth will still be all about how she looks.  And it’s not just our girls that are getting this message; our boys are picking up on this baloney too.

Dustin Hoffman spoke about this recently when he talked about how disappointed he was when he was ‘made over’ into a woman for the movie Tootsie.  He’d assumed that he would be a reasonably attractive woman but instead he was... well Tootsie.  He suddenly realised how many potentially interesting women he may have ignored because he judged them on their appearance. He said he had been brainwashed into thinking only attractive women are worth his time.   You can look at what he said here.

Last week I sat dumbfounded as I watched the first episode of Maia Dunphy’s new documentary series ‘What WomenWant’.  In this first programme Maia examined the world of ‘surgical enhancement’ and women’s obsession with ‘fighting’ ageing.  There was something vaguely sinister about perfectly attractive women in their 20s and 30s being told by very... well frankly odd looking men....  that they (the women) were in need of surgical enhancement to their faces. 

We seem to have already produced a generation of women who are insecure and who struggle constantly with trying to emulate the impossible concept of womanhood that they have been fed over the recent decades. 

So by all means I would support a ban on Child Beauty Pageants but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that that one step is going to make any difference to the majority of our children who are being sexualised right under our noses.  The second generation young women are well on the way to being completely brainwashed.. and it’s taking place in your home, every day of the year.  What are we going to do about that?