By Kaylee Johnson
Campus News
Every eight weeks I spend three hours at a small hair salon in Upstate New York getting my dark brown hair bleached. A few months ago, I dyed my hair black during a nervous breakdown fueled by rejection and art. The salon is the downstairs of the owner’s house, and it reeks of cat urine and cherry blossom scented Febreze. For the past six years I have been getting my hair done by a tall, lean, fifty-something woman we’ll call “Corrine” who loves gossiping, as most hairstylists do. But what I have noticed about Corrine is her exquisite communication skills; she knows the art of timing and juicy conversation, a skill I have never perfected.
Usually, my mother tags along with me to get her grays covered up, and she loves Corrine because the woman is willing to listen to her nonsensical ideas about beauty and plight, and everything in the middle. I enjoy when my mother comes too, for then I can sit back and observe instead of engaging in wasteful small talk; feeling numb and traumatized. I find myself trying to get high off of the bleachy chemical fumes to take the edge off of the imaginary tension between me and the hairstylist. But my mother is as graceful as Corrine; a poised socialite.
Corrine’s social skills are just as important as her ability to style hair nicely. Her paycheck depends on those two qualities. I know that if I were a hairstylist, I would make backhanded comments to balding men and lice-ridden children, and certainly not get repeat customers. The truth is, I have never worked a customer service job; I have never dealt with belligerent middle-aged women trying to return wine and blood-stained tunics, or sixteen-year-olds trying to purchase lower shelf vodka without ID, or college students who happily allow a Sephora worker spend thirty minutes doing their makeup without any intention of purchasing any of the products used. I am a junior in college without any customer service skills, and when I see them being used by professionals, I marvel at their phoniness and raw ambition.
Phoniness, that is what the phenomena is. If I were to crack Corrine’s bright smile with a sledgehammer and look at the pieces under a microscope, I would find nothing but pieces of dirt and fool’s gold; and I would come to the perplexing realization that all this time I was marveling at her acting skills rather than her sincerity. Yet, even though her words have no depth, there is an art to her suave communication; I wonder how many years it took her to acquire such confidence and vigor.
Corrine does not know I am a writer. She knows very little about me, because I am always too enveloped in all of the sensations going on around me to talk. My mother tells her everything, and fails to look beyond the hair dryer for meaning. There is a lot to analyze in that small wood paneled salon; things my mother would never see. Maybe I should just let my coffee-colored roots grow out; I would not want to be another honey hued phony, who talks of emotional freedom but writes from her own mental dungeon.
I challenge you to look into the orbs of your hairstylists and search for authenticity. You probably won’t find any; they have been trained to act in a robotic fashion to maximize customer service skills. They won’t tell you if your shirt is too tight or if you smell of BO. They only know how to talk about shoes, Meghan Markle, and hosting parties. So, I suppose hair salons are not all that different than they were in the fifties and sixties. One of my favorite films growing up was “Steel Magnolias” and much of it takes place in an intimate southern hair salon run by Truvy Jones (Dolly Parton). In that salon women gossiped, laughed, and shared secrets. At seven years old I thought womanhood would be full of hair appointments like that; utterly domestic and posh. A hair salon is still a symbol of beauty, womanhood, and unattainable standards. Yet, we keep getting our roots colored. There are words written on our silver strands; you just have to dilate your eyes to read them.
Kaylee Johnson is a junior education major concentrating in English at a college in Albany, NY.
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