Right before my 40th birthday, I posted this note:
One major concern about turning 40 was that I hadn’t yet found a daily hairstyle. That sounds like a dumb lead to an AI listicle but it’s not! All the grown ass women I admire have a look I could recognize down the block. Labile hair moods are very 20s to me. I rode the greasy bun and impulsive pixie cut it as far as I could.
So after a lot of experimentation I can officially unveil the one. I’ve now done it ten days in a row and it hits the major criteria: can do it with ease no matter the energy level, works better messy, makes me feel like one of my ancestors trooping through the Slavic snow!
It’s a bit like sharing a baby name -- people will interpret based on their own associations, but that’s okay because mostly you have to like it!
Without further ado. We call this… the Wetzel’s Pretzel.
As women age, they -- ideally and often -- become more themselves. And with that, some of the manic highs and lows that may have been expressed via drastic hair choices seem to subside.
In my twenties and thirties, I could barely sit still, much less settle on a hair do(n’t.) Restless Hair Syndrome led to:
And in 2017 alone…
Now, a look at some of these iconic women with their over forty forever do’s. They may play around with presentation, but they’ve made a staunch decision about who they are and how they feel best.
I want to know this peace! Which doesn’t mean you can’t have a little fun here and there, but the days of “fuck it, hair grows!” are behind us. A few years ago, I had a sudden and impossible to ignore lust for a box of black hair dye. Even before I looked in the mirror, I felt it -- some armor, paper thin but indestructible, forming around me. I can’t explain why it feels so good -- maybe it’s literally just the fact that I idealized Veronica Lodge as a child, no simpler than that -- but I know I genuinely like it because about once a month my mother says some version of “what if we just brought it up to a warm auburn? Compliment those big beautiful eyes?” and I feel nothing! Nothing!
This is the longest I’ve gone in my adult life without having an unbearable emotion and enacting it on my head. It’s sort of wild, how much space hair possibilities took up in my head, and then the shame of living with the choice. This SNL skit spoke to me so intensely it felt like a drama:
Now, I no longer scan the aisle to see which jar of Manic Panic stirs something (btw the founders are sisters with the most pleasing Sunday routine imaginable.) I am not looking at Rooney Mara or Carey Mulligan or Odessa A’Zion and wondering if I might look *kind of amazing* with those baby bangs/that ombre lob/a perm. But I live for an accessory. This year, prime barrette locale C.O. Bigelow (the place where, freshman year, Jemima convinced me to drop thirty bucks on an ivory acetate headband that gave me migraines! The place where my father took me after I had my eggs unsuccessfully frozen so that I could spend a hundred dollars on children’s barrettes! The place where I once kissed a boy who kept all his cigarette butts in a briefcase!) saw lines around the block, when all the CBK revenants found out it was where she scored her signature Charles Wahba tortoiseshell crowns. Fancy pants brands like Sophie Buhai are doing their own versions, and I love the curation of pins and combs at Vestige. It’s all creamy wedding elegance at Lelet, and you’re a carefree technicolor girl, try Chunks. The assortment of Kanzashi hair pins from Chidoriya are the rare item that both whimsical and sleek girls will find thrilling (Kansashi is a traditional Japanese hair ornament. While Westerners will mostly recognize them from imagery of Geishas, they date back even further and were decorated to indicate a woman’s class position or marital status. Chidoriya notes that some styles were even “modified for self-defense.”)
But to me, this mission is a way to utilize Etsy for its truest purpose -- doo-dads! Much like free solo-ing a sheer rock face, “free scrolling” Etsy will take you to the outer limits of human capability and then back again.
Free scrolling (verb): going from link to link for an hour or more, letting the algo have its way with you, until you enter the hypnotic trance known as… great taste.
As in: “Bro, I free scrolled my way into a revelation last night!”
So I free scrolled Etsy up, down and all around until my neck froze and I was seeing acetate jumbo claw clips in my dreams.
Behold, the most compelling hair accessories I found, interpreted as if they were women:
She loves Memphis furniture, misses her chunky 90s cordless phone and would enjoy making out with a Safdie brother: Paloma Picasso-esque squiggle’
She took welding lessons in Red Hook, has a Calder coffee table book and uses a milk jug to wash her hair so that she never has to experience the “utter violence” of a shower head: silver Samsara swirrel hair pin or teensy spiral doodle hair pin
She was profoundly offended when Kim K ripped the Marilyn dress, bleached her hair so hard that it broke off at the root, says Eve Babitz “taught her what it means to live” and won’t tell you her age, even though you were at her 25th bday party… twenty years ago: vintage Marilyn nameplate barrette
She thinks Georgia O’Keefe “had it all figured out,” has a Mary Oliver quote stuck above her desk and is in a legal battle with her neighbor because she refuses to trim the branches of her Bottlebrush tree that straddles the property line: silver Calla Lily hair pin or same reference but in a satisfyingly smooth wood
She just wants to meet a nice girl at the Arcteryx store and live happily ever after, reading Jon Krakauer novels and smoking medical marijuana: curvaceous forest hippie hair forks or granny’s whittled cane hair stick
She’s never met a beaded garment she didn’t want to wear. She reads the collected letters of the Mitford sisters while smoking on her pull chain toilet. She’s not British, but she does say “motorway”: bright young thing jumbo garnet and emerald Cabochon hair forks
Hello Kitty is a girl, not a cat: “it’s not up for debate! That was the creator’s intention!” she screams with genuine rage. But minutes later, she’s asking if you want to order some Pinkberry and watch Powerpuff Girls under her slanket. It doesn’t matter that she just turned 52- childhood is a state of mind: carved sandalwood bimbo bow
Rose O’Neill, the creator of the Kewpie, was the first self made female millionaire, but she lost it all because she was too busy fucking her brains out and knocking back shots. The woman who wears this iridescent Kewpie claw is a “proud female entrepreneur” now, but she could easily become a full time Disney adult later.
Gerard Way was her first psychosexual fixation and she moved to New York to find him, before learning he didn’t live there. Now that he’s served her with a restraining order for devil dialing his wife, she hangs out at Forbidden Planet with her dyed black hair scraped up in this, hoping to meet a guy who never graduated from emo bangs so she can clip them back tenderly with these.
She goes to Miami just for the neon signs. Her daughter is named Lux. She tells you that her energetic channels are too open and it’s causing digestive issues- “a doctor who merges east and west” told her this (but it’s not the same doctor who prescribed her Mounjaro so that she can fit into a sample size vintage Missoni bikini.) This is the only plant she’s ever kept alive.
She’s a LILS- late in life Swifty. “How did that girl manage to write a whole album about my divorce?” She’s angry still- Dave just gave up on being happy- but somewhere through the Evermore portion of her ninth Eras concert, she had a breakthrough so profound she began to weep: “But *I* never gave up.” She’ll cry again when you give her this.
She knows Gwen Stefani has changed, but she’ll never change her mind about her. She’s matching these to her Depop-acquired Valentino rock studs, slapping on Nars Jungle Red, and staying home to rewatch Sid & Nancy with her senior dog (a Maltese named: Trouble.) They really don’t make junkies like they used to:(
She’s recording experimental dance music in the vein of her heroine Grimes. She owns a 3D printer, which she uses to make press-on nails. When and if she ever decides to get pregnant, she’ll be delighted if the baby comes out as a cloud emoji with eyes. And she doesn’t go anywhere without her Matthew Barney nightmare of a hair comb.
She’s not a regular trauma surgeon, she’s a cool trauma surgeon
It’s been thirty years, but she’s still mad that Nickelodeon cancelled Aaahh Real Monsters after a mere 52 episodes. Her last boyfriend broke up with her because she had a cartoony voice she used to talk to his penis. But who needs a lover when you have this.
She Hilaria Baldwin’d, but replace Spain with Italy, where she spends six months a year working with artisans on her “left of center” line of “functional and beautiful” printed table cloths (“because the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive!”) She has so much hair that she needs two sets of these to achieve her signature messy bun.
She did enough ketamine (before it was mainstream!) to think that this is a good idea.
She’s repulsed by mass production, which to her means any object made in an edition of five or more. She won’t tell you where she got her sunglasses, or even what search terms she used. She thinks poets shouldn’t have day jobs, but she’s engaged to a partner at Merill Lynch- “it works because we don’t pretend to own one another.” She cut her hair into a shaggy pixie last month, after her two foot long braid got caught in the subway door (she was so distracted reading Jean Stein’s Edie Sedgwick biography.) But, much to her delight, she has found that her exposed neck “really allows my pendants to take on a more prominent role. I’m never going back.” She really did mean it, until she saw this and was filled with bitter regret.
She’s my mother and only my mother.
She was nostalgic for the nineties way before it reached fever pitch- but how can she be nostalgic for a time before she was born? Cuz… she’s 12. Tonight- as she makes collages out of chopped up teen magazine typefaces and haunting photos of Bijou Phillips and Dominique Swain that she printed out in the school library- she’ll keep her hair out of her eyes with a set of vintage Cosmopolitan Magazine branded barrettes. “Mom?” she asks the forty two year old woman who gave birth to her. “What was it like in the olden days?”
She is Samantha- arguably the American Girl Doll with the least compelling backstory but damn, her accessories were good.
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