Hair Fertiliser, Emails, Eggs, Losing Everything
Strands of Myth and Memory (and where the Venn Diagram overlaps)
Many years ago I joined the longhaircommunity.com forum under the username ‘long.hairgirlnz’. Amused but almost deterred, I learnt my hair was considered rather short in comparison to the vast majority on the forum.
I learnt hair tips, such as spritzing perfume on your brush before doing your 100 strokes, and terminology like “fairytale ends”, which is what you get when you allow your hair to naturally taper off into a horseshoe shape, rather than cutting a blunt hemline.
This community is also where I first heard of Mason Pearson brushes and subsequently forked out NZ$380 for a Popular Boar Bristle Hairbrush, my first real foray into a deliberate and considered hair routine.
The brushes are still made in London.
I emailed Mason Pearson for a factory tour, but they were cagey in their reply:
“As much as I would like to grant your wish of a factory tour, we do not allow access to anyone external due to confidentiality reasons, and this includes photography, I’m afraid.”
Every time I see my mum, I ask for a trim. One time, when I was working at Wanaka New World during summer University holidays, she came to the supermarket during my 15 minute break and cut my hair in the parking lot.
The biggest change to my hair in the last while was when I got bangs after pressure and encouragement from my students at the school I taught at in Tokyo.
I went to the closest salon with a photo (probably well-known by every hairdresser in the world) of Brigitte Bardot, and snip. I now had a tiny fringe with wispy bits framing my face, attempting to suggest the presence of cheekbones.
The fringe remains, in a range of forms, to this day; my ever-accommodating friends keep it in check with trims over the bathroom sink when it starts to get shaggy.
THE SEVEN SUTHERLAND SISTERS
The Victorian rags-to-riches-to-rags sordid ‘Seven Sutherland Sisters’ sold millions of dollars of their “Hair Fertilizer” (a concoction later revealed to be a mixture of witch-hazel, water, rum, salt, magnesia, and hydrochloric acid) in the late 1800’s.
Collectively, the sisters had over 11 metres of hair, and the tonic promised similar results.
When one of the sisters, Naomi, died in 1893 while business was booming, they hired a fake long-haired “sister” to take her place. They built a mansion and lived in it together.
One-by-one the sisters died and their fortune depleted. Their downfall was due to a financially deadly combination of extravagant lifestyle choices, (for example, Victoria Sutherland adorned her fingernails with diamonds, and another sister insisted on real gold horseshoes for her horse) as well as the fact that people began lopping their hair off into bobs, à la Daisy Buchanan, in full force by the 1930’s.