There’s a kind of loneliness that happens in a salon chair that nobody warns you about. Not dramatic. Just the quiet disorientation of looking in a mirror while someone else decides, with total confidence, what you should want.
Carol retired in March. She’d been doing my hair since my kids were in middle school, which is to say for a very long time. We weren’t friends exactly, but we knew each other’s business in the way you do when you see someone six times a year for two decades. She knew my cowlick. She knew I always regret going too short. She didn’t show me inspiration photos because she already knew what we were doing. I didn’t think about how much I depended on that until it was gone.
The new person’s name is Jade
She’s competent. She’s sweet. She’s twenty-four years old and she has this extraordinarily thick, healthy bun on top of her head and skin that doesn’t need anything, and I don’t hold any of that against her. Not really.
But she keeps showing me her phone.
The waiting room at the new salon has those low chairs with the chrome legs that are really hard to get out of gracefully, and there’s always a Real Housewives rerun on a TV mounted too high on the wall. These are small things. I notice them every time because I’m nervous, probably. The first time I sat in Jade’s chair she pulled up photos of, I don’t know, seven or eight women. They all had this very specific kind of hair. You’ve seen it. That soft, lived-in, beachy situation that looks like someone spent forty-five minutes on it but also maybe didn’t try at all. The women in the photos were roughly my height and build, I think, but they were thirty-two. Maybe thirty-five on the outside. The hair color was described to me as “multidimensional ash with a warm base” which I did not understand but nodded at.
I said something like, “maybe a little softer than that,” and she nodded and found a different photo of a different thirty-two-year-old.
What I was actually trying to say
I’ve been trying for a long time, longer than I’m going to admit here, to figure out what I actually want my hair to do. This sounds like a small problem. I know it sounds like a small problem.
For most of my adult life I was dressing my hair for other things. For a job that required a certain kind of put-together. For a marriage that had opinions about it, though my ex never said so outright, it was just one of those things you absorb and don’t examine until later. For some idea of what a competent woman in her forties looked like, and then her fifties, which is a different thing somehow, I’m not sure I can explain how. I spent years growing it out and then chopping it off because I’d read somewhere that women over fifty should go shorter, and I believed that, and then I resented it, and then I did it again anyway.
At some point Carol and I had arrived at something that worked. It wasn’t dramatic. It was just, this is your hair. This length, this much wave, this color that’s close to what it was before it went. I didn’t love it passionately. But I recognized myself in the mirror.
Jade wants to give me a transformation. I can tell. She has that energy. It’s not a bad energy exactly. I was twenty-four once.
The photos, continued
She showed me a photo of Jennifer Aniston at one point. I think it was meant kindly. She said, “this is a great reference for the face framing.” And I looked at it and thought, well. Jennifer Aniston spends more per week on that hair than I spend on groceries, and also she is Jennifer Aniston, and I’m a retired high school librarian from outside of Akron. These are different situations.
I didn’t say that. I said, “I like the layers.”
I’ve started dreading the phone a little. Not Jade herself, just the phone. The parade of women presented to me as if I haven’t thought about this, as if I just need to see the right image and then I’ll know. Maybe that works for some people. I have a pretty clear sense of what I don’t want, actually. I don’t want to look like I’m trying to walk back fifteen years. I don’t want to look severe either, I went through a severe phase in my forties and I looked, honestly, kind of angry all the time. I don’t want to look like I’ve given up, though I’m not sure exactly what that means or who decides it or what they’re basing it on.
What I want is harder to explain and I keep not explaining it to Jade because she shows me the phone before I get the words out.
It was raining the last time I went. I sat in the parking lot for a few extra minutes listening to the radio, which I almost never do.
Carol knew without being told
I don’t want to make Carol sound like a saint. She had strong opinions about celebrities and once spent forty minutes telling me about a conflict with her homeowners association that I couldn’t fully follow even when I was trying. She cut my bangs too short in 2019 and I was quietly furious about it for longer than was reasonable.
But she had this habit of just starting. You’d sit down, she’d look at you in the mirror for a second, and then she’d pick up her scissors or her brush and begin. She’d ask something like, “same deal?” and you’d say yes, and that was it. There was something calming about it. The absence of consultation.
That’s what I miss. Not just her, but that specific thing.
You build that with someone over years and then it ends and you’re back to explaining yourself from scratch, which is exhausting at this stage of life, or at least I find it exhausting. I have explained myself enough. To enough people, in enough contexts. I’m tired of the intake forms of it all, if that makes sense.
She probably thinks she’s helping
Jade is showing me those photos because she was trained to do it. Probably literally, in cosmetology school, someone said use visual references, consult with your client. It’s a professional practice. It makes sense for clients who don’t know what they want.
And maybe there’s a version of this where I come in wanting to be transformed too. I don’t know. Maybe I’m being rigid. There’s a reasonable chance I’m being rigid.
But the photos are always young women. Always. And I’ve noticed there’s a whole vocabulary in the beauty world around aging hair that is organized around one goal, which is appearing younger. Softening lines. Adding dimension to gray. Brightening the complexion. All of it is directional. All of it points backward. And I keep wondering why that’s the only option on the menu, why nobody is figuring out what it might mean to look like the age you are but in a way that’s still yours, not in a way that signals defeat.
I don’t know if that’s even a thing you can ask for. I genuinely don’t know. Maybe the anti-aging framework is just what “looking good” means now and I’m being precious about the framing. That’s possible too.
The thing about gray
My hair started going in my mid-forties. I colored it for years, and the coloring was fine, but it required vigilance and money and every six to eight weeks there was this deadline. When the salons closed during COVID I stopped for a few months and then just didn’t start again.
The grow-out was rough. It looked bad for a long time. I watched a lot of YouTube videos about it. There’s an entire subculture around this, women documenting the process, and I found some of those videos comforting the way watching someone else go through something hard can be comforting even when it doesn’t actually help.
I also, during this period, found a lip balm I liked a lot and then they discontinued it, which has nothing to do with anything but I’m still annoyed about it.
Carol helped me get through the grow-out. She talked about it practically, which I appreciated. She didn’t say anything about embracing my age. She just said, let’s get the front to behave and see what we have.
Jade looked at my gray at our first appointment and said, genuinely enthusiastically, “this is so trendy right now.” She meant it as a compliment. I smiled. It just wasn’t the sentence I needed. I didn’t get here by trying to be trendy.
What I actually tried to say the second appointment
I prepared a little. I know how that sounds. I thought about what I wanted to say on the drive over, past the strip mall with the mattress store that’s been going out of business for three years. Something like: I’m not trying to look younger, I’m not trying to make a statement, I just want the hair to look like it belongs to someone who knows who she is.
Jade pulled out her phone before I finished my second sentence.
I lost my nerve. I looked at the photos. I picked the one that seemed the least dramatic. We had a fine appointment. My hair looks pretty good, objectively. I feel sort of okay about it.
And then I drove home thinking I should have said more, which is a stupid thing to spend energy on. I’m sixty-one years old and I can’t tell my hairdresser what I want. My therapist would probably find this interesting. She’d connect it to something. She might not be wrong, I don’t know.
A small tangent about my friend Della
Della has been going to the same person for about thirty years. A woman named Patricia who works out of her house, technically illegal in our township, though the township doesn’t seem to care. Della says Patricia does the same thing every time and has never once asked what Della wants, and Della loves this completely.
I used to think that sounded limiting. Now I understand it.
Della’s hair isn’t exciting. It’s just her hair. She doesn’t think about it after she leaves Patricia’s basement. There’s a freedom in that I didn’t used to appreciate.
I’m not sure I’ll find my Patricia. Carol was close but Carol retired to Sarasota and I cannot follow her there just for a haircut, though I’ve made peace with the fact that this thought crossed my mind at least twice.
The part I can’t quite resolve
There’s a question underneath all of this that I haven’t answered. Which is whether I actually know what looking like myself means, or whether I’ve just been telling myself I do.
Maybe I’m asking Jade to do something that isn’t a real instruction. “Make me look like myself, not younger, just me” is maybe not something you can hand another person and expect them to work with. Carol might have known what to do with it because she had twenty years of data, not because I was ever saying anything particularly clear.
I don’t know how long it takes to build that with someone new. Years, probably. I don’t want it to take years. I want to walk in and be known already, which is obviously not how anything works, which I know perfectly well.
The next appointment is in six weeks. I’m going to try again to say what I mean before she gets to her phone. I keep thinking I should write it down so I don’t lose it halfway through. I haven’t done that yet. I’ll probably walk in and say something vague and look at the photos and go home feeling fine but not quite right. Or maybe not. Maybe Jade will start to get it eventually. She seems smart. She’s twenty-four, not incapable.
I also noticed I’ve been carrying around a birthday card in my coat pocket for two weeks that I keep forgetting to mail. That has nothing to do with any of this. I just keep finding it in there.