Utah hair: Purposefully voluminous and straight.
Just more than two years ago, I was wandering through my local Costco. In my quest for large items to fill up my new and empty apartment, I found a phenomenon I like to call Virginia hair. It consists basically of this: A large cowlick on either side of the part, strange kinks pulling the hair in all directions with fuzzy short hairs (with a slight resemblance to hairs that cover another part of the body) sticking straight up. In order to get this look one must roll out of bed, put her clothes on and walk out the door. Or for a more fuzzed out look, she must wash her hair in between steps one and two and then walk out the door.
It bothered me at first, that many Virginian women don't do their hair. And then summer came. I'd wake up and complete my usual regimen - shower, glaze my locks with product, blow-dry, straighten, spray, touch-up and finally, walk out the door. But in less than ten minutes I was sporting Virginia hair.
Humidity may be my skin's best friend, but it will never win over my hair. And so it is with most women in my area, who tend to leave their hair alone because it is only a waste of time to do anything with it.
This was strange at first for a girl who comes from the land of perfectly-coiffed hair. Hair is big in Utah - in both senses of that phrase. If you graduated from high school in Utah, chances are that at least 25 percent of the gals in your class went on to become hairstylists. And you can always count on getting a good hair cut while visiting Utah.
But hair is also big literally. Probably 50 percent of those female classmates manipulated their hair in some fashion to give it extreme body. Take my seventh grade self, for example, sleeping with an over-sized and incredibly uncomfortable velcro curler on the crown of my head in order to get just the right amount of volume, which, at the time, was at least two inches off my head (and ended up looking just like I was still wearing a curler in my hair throughout the day). The other night my girlfriends (the ones from Utah, of course) told me of a technique that would have really helped me in the volume department. Apparently, it's called back-combing (a nice word for ratting) and it's all the rage in Utah.
After graduating from middle school and discovering that hair just wasn't my thing, I moved on from large voluminous hair to my boring blonde locks. And now I spend less time doing my hair than ever in my life (on the days that I do it - Sundays). I'm not proud of this but I have kind of let my hair go ;(.
On our Thanksgiving trip to St. George, however, I did my hair almost every morning! That was until I went shopping with the sisters-in-law on black friday. We hit up Target and as we walked to the toy aisle, I had to stop and look around. There was not a hair out of place in the entire store and the place was packed. Perfect (albeit a bit high) hair was everywhere - on moms, on daughters, on grandmothers on granddaughters. I was both impressed and a little grossed out. Everyone looked fabulous. What's so wrong with that? Yet, I left the store wanting to mess my mid-length tresses up and never use my straightening iron again.
So I guess I'm embracing my Virginia hair now. And I'll go with Utah hair on Sundays.
Virginia hair. Voluminous and naturally wavy/frizzy. But not on purpose.
Cache Valley, Utah hair. Voluminous and permified. Entirely different blog post altogether. Maybe some other time.
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