My Life in Hairstyles

Teenage girl in the 1970s with medium length dark wavy hair

Dear friends. How experimental have you been with your hair over the years? I didn't think I had been, until I started looking at old photos. Folks, I have had short hair, long hair, a bob, a mullet, permed hair and hair extensions (klaxon). I went from dark to red and then blonde. Let's look at the evolution.

The first pic above is one of my favourites. I'm in my early 20s. Throughout my teens to my 40s, this was mostly my default look. I called it the "au naturelle" because my hair was quite thick and wavy, and I liked it to do its own thing. I hated going to the hairdressers because they were always trying to cut it shorter or blow dry it straight.

Mind you, when I was young, my mum had it all cut off because my hair got very tangly and only my dad had the patience to get rid of the tangles. But I grew it back after a waitress called me "sonny" !

Girl aged around six in the 1960s with short dark hair

Adventures with Colour

I started using semi permanent colour when I was about 15, at school. At that time I had a feather cut (also known as a mullet); sadly, all those photos are at my Mum's so I don't have one to show you. I remember that the first time I coloured my hair was with a Rimmel product in a glass bottle. The next day we had a fire alarm at school and had to stand outside in the rain. The dye started running down my face, which was mortifying.

My hair got alarmingly red at times. Here I'm about 20 and I'd had a few inches lopped off. I used henna occasionally. What a mess it made.

I dyed it black when I was about 19. I remember being mortified when I was on the bus and a child behind me said loudly "Why has that lady got a brown streak at the back of her hair?" Note the classic Christmas decor below.

Here I'm in my 40s and reddish. I'd found a hairdresser who used a diffuser and encouraged my waves. However, I stopped going to her after I got home and found red dye all down the back of my white top!

We'll go back to colour later. How about perms, ladies? Who remembers them? My first perm was done by my mum, with one of those Tweeny Twink boxes. The perm rods were my Gran's. At the time my hair was quite long, and the perm made it very wide and woolly. I decided I wouldn't let my mum do it again so I went to Jill Finch at the Co-Op and came out like this, aged 16. It was so coarse I had to use a special comb.

I only liked the perm when it had grown out considerably.

When I first went blonde

I had a very brief flirtation with blonde when I was 39 and used a home bleaching kit. I'd been having highlights - which in those days involved strands of hair being pulled through a holey swimming cap with a crochet hook - and thought I would go the whole hog. It looked OK initially, although it wasn't very even. But when I tried to retouch the roots, they came out ginger. I then tried dyeing it back to dark brown, but two colourants later, I was a strange mousey colour and my hair was in terrible condition. The moral of that story is not to attempt these things at home.

Hair extensions before they were trendy

In 1999, long before they were trendy or mainstream, I had hair extensions. I wanted to know what really long hair felt like. My own hair has never grown below the shoulders.

I went to a specialist salon near Reading owned by Lucinda Ellery, who went on to become extremely well known in this field. She developed a hair system for people with severe hair loss. Anyway, it took an extraordinarily long time - about six hours - and the extensions were bonded to my own hair, which was quite short, using glue and a gun. The first night was incredibly painful, like sleeping on bags of frozen peas.

The extensions often fell out in random places. A lot of extensions are put in initially because of this problem. I remember being in an airport on business and seeing a whole hank of hair by my feet. I was with a group of colleagues so I tried to bend down to scoop it into my bag without anyone seeing.

After a couple of months I needed the extensions replaced because of regrowth. During the second cycle I got bored with the "faff" - drying my hair took forever - so I extracted them myself. And as far as having long hair was concerned, unfortunately I couldn't wear a bun, as I'd always wanted to do, because when I tried to put the hair up, my own short hair was visible underneath.

This is the longest my own hair has ever grown. I'm with John's late mum, I'm probably in my late 40s.

Getting to where I am now

I started seeing a new stylist, Jodie, in about 2014 and had some lowlights and then highlights put in. Jodie had been trained by Toni & Guy and was extremely good with colour. She was also using Davines organic colours, which are so kind to the hair. As is often the way with highlights, I wanted more. This was me in 2015.

I had a medium length bob for a while and then Jodie messaged me on Instagram to say she wanted to try a different cut, to better match my fashion blogging. I agreed with her - there were a lot of ladies of a certain age around with the same bob hairstyle and highlights. So for a while I had quite an edgy cut in that it was very short and razored at the back. I loved it, but a few others didn't.

I started to wonder if I had "blonded" too soon, and if I should find my way back to darker hair. The upkeep, cost and time it takes to maintain my blonde hair is a killer. Jodie did a very clever job with a combination of colours - below - but I went back to blonde as soon as I could. Mum said the darker hair made me look older.

Where I am now

It's still blonde (and dark underneath) and I have the roots touched up every two months, with highlights every three months or so. I'm not yet planning to go grey. It's a very personal decision and at the moment there's a view that you're somehow not a feminist or you're letting the side down if you keep colouring your hair. I'll freely admit that my hair makes me feel youthful - but I can still be a feminist! My hair has the usual female pattern of going very pale/white around my face, but being very dark still at the back. This was me about 4 years ago: