I can pinpoint exactly when my hair slowed down, it happened eleven years ago. Until then I’m sure it had advanced as other people’s do at the average half inch a month. In full confidence that it’s steady multiplication would redress any horrible mistake I had my long hair cut into a sharp chin length bob. The new haircut was great, swinging and shiny, blond and bouffant. Only six months later did I realise that there had been a curious transformation in the germination from my scalp. Rather than getting longer my hair simply got thicker. Length had been jostled out by substance. Instead of growing out my bob I found that I was growing in a mushroom cap. A year later my face was no longer framed by a sleek close cut drape but rather by a hirsute bubble.  

I stuck at it and finally four years later it was shoulder length. I had a trim and highlights. Normally highlights need the roots of the hair to be lightened every six to eight weeks to keep the colour looking even, for me replace weeks with months. My hairdressers were amazed by the sparseness of my visits as opposed to the luxuriance of my thatch. I began to be gripped by a fear, every trim that the hairdresser’s made (minimum 1cm) meant waiting six months to get back to where I had been prior to the slight snip. I stopped going to the hairdresser. My interminable patience won out over my hair’s procrastination and finally it descended to shoulder length.  

It was all very mysterious as my nails were still growing as fast as they ever did, I still had to shave my legs every week and my eyebrows needed plucking regularly. Anyway I got used to the more torpid state of affairs and just stopped going to the hairdresser. Finally though I had enough length to tie the damn stuff back in a pony tail and forget about it and that’s what I did for the next five years. The pony tail’s been great since I moved out to Turkey, when it’s 45 degrees in the shade who wants a thick heavy mat sticking to the back of their neck? And it was sublimely baby proof too. Things change though and having not shed all my baby weight yet I decided that there was no need to be fat and frumpy.  

It takes a leap of faith though to go to a Turkish hairdresser, not just because of any language barrier or lack of hair-related vocabulary but because of the artistic ego of the coiffeuse. This tends to be even more the case if one uses a male hairdresser so to increase the chances of getting the haircut I wanted I chose a female hairdresser. There was still an element of risk though as in the Olympian field of Hairdos, Turks are definitely the Freestyle champions.Turkey is absolutely saturated with highly trained hairdressers and who are not only skilled in the art of cutting hair but also in looking at clients and making judgements about which haircuts will go with which faces. This means that what you request and what you end up with are not always one and the same. 

I did my research and pored over the internet looking for a style that was attractive but manageable. I can’t be doing with blow drying or straighteners (hence the joys of the pony tail) or any kind of exhaustive morning activity. I found something I thought was good, printed it off and went to Aysun’s beauty parlour. Aysun looked at the picture and commented that it was ‘interesting’ in a tone of voice that indicated it was nothing of the sort. Then she sat me down, combed my hair out, made the usual comment about how thick it was and then announced that this was the problem! No one had ever said this before, in the UK they talked about the thickness as if it were a great boon but in my heart I have always harboured doubts about the advantages. It seemed that the thickening of my hair coincided with my inability to do anything with it. Aysun’s words cut to the heart of my indecision. I threw away the picture, both physically into the bin and mentally into oblivion. Taking a deep breath, I willed myself into a more daring state of mind, and told Aysun to do her worst, or rather whatever she felt was best. 

The ferociousness of the attack was unexpected; Aysun set to work with the thinning scissors like a person possessed. These are something I’ve never seen in the UK, they are a cross between a comb and a scissor, like the pinking shear of the hair world they take some of the hair away but leave other parts untouched. She cut and cut and cut into my hair. I sat still, almost catatonic from the shock of just how much hair I was losing. At the end she stepped back and her assistant swept enough hair away from beneath me to fill a pillow. I shook my head and some delicate light feeling swept across the back of my neck. I held my breath while she moussed the remainder and scrunched it in her palms. Suddenly free of the terrible weight my remaining hair sprung into light curls, little tendrils snaked round the nape of my neck, fronds drifted over my ears and kisscurls fell softly on my brow. It was gorgeous. It’s been this way for a week now and I can recreate the ‘Salon Look’ at home in five minutes. Ya boo sucks to my old straight and heavy hair, yay yay for my new light hairstyle. It’s so good I don’t even want it to grow anymore!