Today my Hair Loves Asia

Today was 6 months and 17 days since my last hair cut. Why, you might ask, have I been suffering in this purgatory of split ends? 6 months and 17 days ago, I was in Korea, badly in need of a trim. Picture in hand, I boldly entered a promising salon and charaded a request for these bangs Claudia Schiffer was currently sporting--wispy, sinuous, sexy. What I got was nowhere near Claudia Schiffer and more of what I call the fat Asian girl haircut--blunt, thick bangs paired with an equally unmovable modular block of hair. I remember musing as I entered the salon how strange it was that these girls would select a hairstyle so obviously unflattering for well-endowed cheeks (or for almost anyone). And then I left the salon sporting what had become the fat American girl haircut, which was as unflattering on my well-endowed cheeks as it had been on the chubby ladies who exited before me. It has taken me all of the last 6 months and 17 days to outgrow the geometric absurdity of that hair cut.

That's not to say that I shouldn't have been wary before I even entered the salon in Korea. Only a year prior I had made the equally devastating decision to perm my hair (also in Korea). For those of you envisioning the giant curly rat nests of the 80s and early 90s, let me explain myself (though I in no way deny the error of my perm ways). Asian girls have stick straight hair. Like most females, they crave what they cannot have. And so they turn to the perm. Perms never went out of style in Asia, they just adapted to current trends. So after 20+ years of perms in Asia, they have perfected the art of loose waves and bangs engineered to lie charmingly on the forehead (never in the eyes, never swept unattractively to the wrong direction). What Western girl wouldn't want in on that? But what I didn't remember when I made the perm decision was that Asian salons have perfected the loose wave and bang on Asian hair, not slightly-wavy, cowlick, widow-peaked Western hair. My loose waves became spirals of 80s Cher gloriousness and my supposed-to-be-charming bang kinked unattractively 1/4 of the way up my forehead. Not a good decision on my part (or for my part, which they moved to the other side of my head, much to my cowlick's consternation).

And so, traumatized, I tentatively entered into the Japanese salon today. But I was welcomed with the flip side of an Asian hair cut experience. The entire salon staff watched reverently as their sensai (with holstered scissors hanging from his super urbane camo trousers) turned my lackluster Western locks into a paragon of flip and fullness. As he painstakingly measured and trimmed, his geishas cooed around me, pouring green tea, massaging my hands, and proffering me June 09 issues of US Weekly (Jon and Kate are in trouble . . . who knew?). When my hair was ready to be styled, I had three minions who fastidiously blow-dried and curled my foreign strands. And as I left the salon, they apologetically bowed and stammered, "So . . . sorry . . . my english . . .bad" (can you imagine that happening in the US?). All that for $30. There are some days when I love Asia. My hair says that today was one of them.