(no subject)

[dragonlady7]

mmm that winter feeling when finally you've gone so long without washing your hair that even brushing it upside-down to try to distribute the oil isn't doing much and you're gonna have to break down and do it and so you look at the weather forecast for maybe a day when it'll be up near freezing and there isn't one on the horizon so now you gotta think about it and before you know it it's gonna be another week of welllllll i'll wash it laterrrrrr

but listen if you just keep re-braiding it every couple days...

people are like "oh i could never maintain long hair" listen I could never survive with a hairstyle that required daily styling. you can't just braid your unwashed hair a different way when it's too short to braid. i laugh at the folks who have to keep re-buzzing their heads. i don't have to do that. I can take a whole shower in a minute and a half. I wash my hair once a week in the summer. I use a quarter-sized drop of shampoo in one hand, hold my hair straight up with the other hand, and just do my scalp and rinse from the root toward the tip. My hair does not need shampoo in the slightest bit.

in the winter I don't wash my hair much at all and I don't recommend that particularly but honestly it doesn't seem to make a difference.

I need to wash my damn hairbrush though, that thing is nasty. Extra-nasty because I found out Dude's been using it, and he uses Hair Product. (ugh) Because his hair is short now and it needs shitloads more maintenance!!!!!!!

Comments

[rmc28]

I hear you on daily styling! But I am enjoying having short hair now. My hair when long needed rather more maintenance than yours (daily brushing, washing every 2 days, more often if I was doing anything to get sweaty, needed to tie it up somehow to get it out of my eyes etc)

Now it needs a tiny amount of shampoo every morning, in the shower I take anyway, and it dries fast and basically falls into a good-enough shape when it does, and I buzz it back when it starts feeling a bit shaggy, probably every 2 months or so. I haven't quite settled on the length to buzz it *to* - I think the last few times have been to 18mm and I'm considering 15mm next time, but I'm pretty sure 9mm is too short except maybe if we have another heatwave in the summer.

[dragonlady7]

I wrote that post largely, though, because I keep seeing people talking about how pre-modern women with long hair must have Suffered.
No. They're thinking of the kind of long hair you're describing. I bet you wore it down sometimes? At least down enough to need to brush it out and restyle it.

What I'm talking about is long hair as it was worn before shampoo, which came about as recently as I think the 1950s? Shampoo strips your hair and makes it "fluffy" to modern standards, makes it so it can be worn loose and free-flowing and such--- and thus requires daily cleaning and maintenance.

Long hair was never unbound before the hippie revolution of the 60s. A child could have unbound hair, girls before puberty could have braided but otherwise unbound hair, but at puberty, all hair was fastened up in some way. Modern "updos" are not remotely the same thing.

So when I say I do not need to brush my hair daily, I mean that. I wear it braided, and then the braid pinned up, and at night I unpin the braid (sometimes I don't, depends on if I've sewn it in place or not), and then in the morning sometimes I will un-braid and re-do the braid, but I do not need to brush my hair in between because the strands have never been left loose to tangle.

"Long hair" shampooed and worn down is maintenance-intensive and 100% a product of modern times. Our ancestresses were absolutely not doing *any* of that shit and it's silly to imagine that they were.

I could not wear my hair like this in a corporate setting and I am aware of that. I was chastized at a temp agency interview once, because my braided hair was "unprofessional", I should have it styled more fashionably, and I did not get the job. So I'm very much aware that modern long hair is something heavily taxed by the beauty industry.

But modern long hair is not the same thing as pre-1960s long hair.