A recent trip to get a haircut left me thinking about how much that staple of female life has changed in seventy years. In the fifties it was an aggressively female place, with lots of decorating involving pink plastic and fake sparkle. Women sat around in various states of production from shampoos, to cuts, to permanents to coloring. Gone are the beehive hair dryers, the bobby pins for setting the hair into pin curls, and the acrid smell of the chemical solution used to urge straight hair into curls, or more likely, frizz. There is not a pink foam roller in sight, but instead, hand-held hair dryers and curling irons.
The biggest change is that the salon is no longer just for women. At least two men were in the building when I was there, one getting a haircut and the other a dye job on his no-longer-red-without-help thinning hair. Even the pedicure chair had one male in it, his pants rolled up to expose hairy legs and toenails that were being trimmed. Would he in turn get polish on those toes? One can only wonder!!!
Gone are the complicated hairdos of the past---no chignons, no french twists, and no backcombing to create towers of hair. If you have to ask what this last thing is, just be glad you do not know. Instead of the weekly hair wash with shampoos that could take the paint off the side of a car (remember Prell?), there is the daily wash with a much gentler version.
The hours are different as well, as the role of women in society has changed. A business that ran on morning and early afternoon appointments now opens later in the day, the hair dressers working on into the evening to accommodate other working women. The rhythm of holidays has changed as well, with the salons closed over the week between Christmas and New Years. My hair dresser explained to me that the complicated, sweeping hairstyles of the Audrey Hepburn era are gone, as are the routinely extravagant holiday dances and dinners of that same era. A bustling beauty parlor filled with women getting ready for a big night out on New Year's Eve is now silent as its beauticians enjoy a holiday week off.
These changes have come about so slowly that we have all accommodated to them without realizing it. But as I look back it makes me just a little sad. That pink-saturated beauty salon was the nearest thing women had to a golf club, or an Elks Lodge, or Mason's lair. It was a place where you could get beauty treatments and freely look ridiculous doing so. It was a place to discuss purely feminine matters, to relax from the responsibility of house and home, and while under the dryer to read the magazines to which you did not subscribe.
A final note. Isn't it interesting that in this age of equality, women are not storming barber shops for a haircut. Maybe that pink palace of yore was not such a bad place after all.
