April Fools
Candy Girls
Shop Talk by Kitty Kaufman
If you fell asleep in the last century say sometime in 1999 and woke up today, along with needing a shave and a haircut no matter who you are, you would conclude the world is nuts. That what you used to call life is upside down and there is not a single thing left that might be called logic or common sense.Today's example is smack in the middle of the front page of The New York Times, with art.
Our new fashion trend: young style setters paying good money to streak their hair gray. The story goes on to report that a 28 year-old digital director used a lavender tint with hopes of emerging a "rock 'n' roll fairy princess." She wanted to be noticed and although it doesn't say if she became a princess, it's what happened after that brought her notoriety. The lilac faded to gray and as it happens it was New York Fashion Week and so her wish came true: she was noticed.
Interestingly, she isn't the style maker. The Times writer, Ruth La Ferla, reports that models at Chanel and salon clients in Manhattan have been requesting gray streaks for the last six months. Everyone quoted in the story is 13, 16, 28 or "a renegade" meaning no one who's asking for gray streaks is old enough to have any real gray to worry about. Of course.
This is peculiar. And mostly because we are spending over a billion dollars a year, according to Nielsen and Ms. La Ferla, to cover what happened though we swore it would not. Even if our mother was gray and our father was not, his genes would trump hers and we would never be gray. It could happen to other people but not to us.
But it did. For a few years my then hairdresser convinced me I could hide the gray by doing streaks and that would put off the whole "have to touch up your roots every six weeks." It could look natural; he might have said sun-kissed but maybe not.
Really what it looked like was someone whose hair was turning gray who was trying to hide it with blonde streaks. No one was fooled, least of all me, but it did buy time. Finally there was way too much gray to keep hoping that the hairs he pulled through the tiny holes in the cap with an instrument of torture, a crochet hook, would be the exact ones that were gray. One day he insisted it was time to cover the brown and gray and blonde with what we hoped was a good match.
To me it was startling and I thought it looked entirely like someone else. No one noticed or if they did, they didn't say anything. Later that week a very good friend saw me for the first time with the whole new brown. She notices everything and here's what she said: "Oh, you look great. You are so not a gray hair person." It's true, I'm not a gray hair person and so I see my colorist, Candice Dellaria, more often than you might imagine. Call me and I'll give you her number.
Anyway, I read Ms. Ferla's Times story several times. It's dated April 1 and in the comments people wrote: "Is this some kind of a joke?" I wondered too along with thinking about other new century styles like people embracing tattoos and the piercing of parts other than ear lobes.
I used to know someone, a very young woman, who started getting tattoos a few years ago. She showed them off very publicly and they were not small. She told me and anyone who would listen how she was planning for the next one and where it would be and how big. I said that she should imagine for a moment 40 years into the future and what it would be like to be 60 with tattoos that don't wash off. "Oh," she insisted, "I will always love my tattoos."
Now, a few hours later, this story in the Times, "Young Trendsetters Streak Their Hair with Gray" is the second most emailed article of the day and I can see why. Of course I sent it to Candy and knowing her, she is laughing her head off.
In case you missed it, you can find it here:
"Young Trendsetters Streak Their Hair with Gray"
© 4/2/2010
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