#38 Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

Anybody who wants a good example of how things have changed since the fifties need only walk down the haircare aisle at any megamarket and see for themselves how much of it is devoted to hair products for men. The very phrase “hair products for men” shows how far around even an oldster like me has come. “Pick me up some hair tonic, Honey” has devolved into “When we go shopping Honey, remind me I need some hair products.” The only good thing about the process is that now my lovely bride and I can share the grocery shopping adventure. Still, from hair tonic to hair products is quite a leap. Somewhere in there most of us went from the barber shop to the styling salon. I blame it all on the blow dryer.
Before that, back in the day—the sixties—we broke the bounds of hair convention and grew out our butches and flattops into the long, tangled, luxuriant locks of the “social revolution.” Hippies, as a rule, didn’t use hair products, and a good stiff boar-hair brush sufficed to tame the mane enough to keep it out of our eyes, and hopefully our lentil soup. Then came the early seventies and with it the technological advance of the hand-held hot comb or blow dryer. Suddenly it was possible to shape that heretofore-hideous hirsute haystack and add some semblance of style. TV anchormen, Johnny Carson, and even Elvis all succumbed to long-ish hair now strictly bound by the “socially permissible revolution.” Long hair had met its match. Of course, all that washing and blow-drying left a brittle hair or two in sinks across the land and, men being men, their constant obsessing about the ever-increasing height of their foreheads led to the “hair product revolution.” Oddly, it no longer mattered whether a product was masculine or feminine. If it arrested baldhood development, it was A-Okay. So the likes of Helene Curtis and Pantene Pro-Vitamin made their way to shower shelves and men slopped them on, first surreptitiously, leading their wives to wonder and worry about mysterious shampoo thieves, then openly, reveling in their spouses’ soft stroking of their new lanolin-enhanced mullets. The nineties saw an explosion of hair product offerings. Fights broke out in bars between righteous advocates of either side of the debate of mousse versus gel. “More volume!” “More control!” they shouted, and broke beer bottles and cue sticks and barstools over each others crispy coiffures.
We’ve come a long way baby. From a tube of Brylcream, where a little dab really would do you, to shelf after shelf full of brightly-colored and Freudian-shaped bottles. Each with their own special chemical concoction to separate, shine, volume-ize, moisturize, heat-treat, vitamin-enhance, lift, thicken, and stiffen. Times have changed. The other day I was showing my 20-year-old son my collection of empty bottles I saved from the fifties. I had a whole case of that original men’s hair product, Vitalis. “What’s that?” he said, “A combination of Viagra and Cialis?” Hmm. I think I found a way to unload them on EBay.
America, ya gotta love it.