11:38 PM |
My younger sister used Herbal Essences too, getting another jump on me in the personal hygiene Olympics. She got to shave her legs first, too. It sucked. Come to think of it, my blue-haired, leather-clad little sister took me to my first bar. She married the cute lead singer in the cover band, of course before I got married.
When I was a child, my mother used Prell shampoo. It was green and viscous, and came in a sort of funky shaped bottle of which I am at a loss to describe. My bestie reminded me that Prell was so thick that the commercial showed a pearl floating ever so slowly. One day, they had a pearl in their shampoo and were convinced it was real. I was struck by how clearly every one of us remembered the shampoo mom used. I thought it was a girl thing, but every man I talked to knew as well. Boy, Prell should never have gone out of business.
While Prell was contemporary, the Breck girls were classic. Grace Kelly. Brooke Shields (!!!). One after another, they looked over their shoulders from the back of McCalls and Good Housekeeping. McCalls had paper dolls too, that you could cut out and pinch on the dresses of the current holiday with paper tabs on the shoulders and waist. Hats came with slits to pop the little heads through. My mother never played with us, so my paper dolls stayed on the page, with no oaktag reinforcement to make them stand. As I got to elementary school, I was certain that if I used Breck shampoo, the honey-colored elixir, I would be pretty too. Maybe mom would play paper dolls with me. I combed and combed and combed my hair, but to my eyes I was still the below average girl.When I went away to college, we started using "conditioner." Before that, the only product we used besides shampoo was the VO5 in the tube that smelled a lot like Vaseline. It probably was Vaseline. My grandmother used it. The whole idea of cream (or creme) rinse was very sophisticated. You had to go to a department store like Bonwitt Teller to buy Pantene. It was like having a Cartier watch. Pantene conditioner smelled like a cross between Crisco and butter, and looked like it too. The bottle had a gold cap, proving it was worth the five dollars a bottle.
My mother rolled her hair on pink foam curlers, the same way she did since the 1940's. Her hair came out with a wave over the eye and she pinned it back near her ear with two criss-crossed bobby pins. She wore those pink curlers to bed every night for the the thirty-three years I knew her, and I'm sure many years before that. I wonder what my father thought of that. I tried it once. It hurt like hell.
My mother never had her hair "done," although my Aunt Mary Alice had a portable hair dryer with the huge vinyl shower-cap type thing into which the hose fitted. You could carry the thing with a plastic strap over your shoulder, although the extension cord had to be really long for the portability to really matter. The hose looked like a vacuum cleaner hose, and I can still smell that vinyl. When I run into a real shower cap, not one of those saran wrap ones you get in hotels, I remember the hair dryer.
Aunt Mary Alice and all the other stylish ladies used Acquanet. Acquanet would hold any hairdo (we had hairdos, not hair styles) through a hurricane. Later, when we had ballet recitals or school performances, we used lots and lots of hairspray. We also used Noxema to get our makeup off, a very adult thing to do.
And now there are aisles and aisles and aisles of hair "product." I wonder what my mother would have thought.