A Hairy Experience

I bet there’s a pretty good chance you’ve never seen one of these things. It’s an antique curling iron used during the 1920’s to marcelle hair. No, I’m not that old. It belonged to my mother. Once, however, when I was in high school she used it on me. Someone accidentally cut my hair REALLY short. After I cried for a few days and declared that I would never go to school again until my hair had grown long enough that people wouldn’t think I looked like Arman Kadahl (our local sheriff), mother heated up the curling iron and managed to put enough curl into my hair that I thought I could pass for a girl and went back to school. (Actually, people today would probably think that was a pretty cool hair cut.)

I’ve experienced a lot of other strange hair things in my lifetime. I guess I just missed the days of tying your hair up with rags. The first curlers that I remember were long skinny metal cylinders that fastened at the end with a little rubber wheel. We wore our hair in braids all week, but on Saturday night mother washed our hair and rolled it up on these curlers. We slept on them all night and Sunday morning they were brushed out into beautiful blonde ringlets.

When I was a teenager, brush rollers were all the rage. That was sort of like putting 20 or 30 hair brushes against your head (held in by long pink plastic picks) and sleeping on them all night. That was followed by the “magnetic roller” craze, which was very much like fastening 20 or 30 empty tomato paste cans onto your head with bobby pins and then sleeping on them. I’m sure you’re wondering why in the world we slept on them. Well, it was b.h.d. (before hair dryers). Our only choices were to wash our hair at night and sleep on the curlers or wash it in the morning and walk around all day with curlers in our hair. If we had a big Friday night date we would wash our hair after school, roll it in curlers and then build a roaring fire in the fireplace. We’d lie on the floor turning this way, then that way until our hair was dry.

When straight hair was popular we ironed our hair on the ironing board. We went through sponge rollers, portable hair dryers with a plastic cap you put on your head to hold the heat in and Hot Rollers. You can click here to see some of the forms of torture you have possibly escaped in life.

But the strangest thing of all was “Mini-poo.” Does anybody know what “Mini-poo" is?