The highlights of life: When times are dark, she knows the one person who can help

I don’t consider myself a vain person. Of course, vanity is relative. For one person being vain may mean owning a tube of lipstick. For someone else excessive vanity could equal getting a deep-plane face-lift.

Quick note: I’m still not over being told I needed a deep-plane face-lift by a cosmetic surgery “consultant” and it’s been a good two years. Yeah, that’s right. I’m still excessively peeved that someone did a cursory glance at my face and told me I needed not only a deep-plane face-lift but also some sort of gruesome neck lift called a platysmaplasty which has absolutely nothing in common with the adorable platypus.

OK, enough about my personal crisis of confidence. Let’s move on to vanity in more general terms, as in what I’m going to call the “must have” vanities. For instance, during the pandemic, I learned that while I could forgo seeing any other humans except the one I married and the two I birthed, I could not go without having my hair highlighted.

I realized that this was the very definition of crazy. If I wasn’t leaving my house and seeing a single bipedal mammal besides my immediate family, why did I require small stripes of gold woven throughout my brown hair?

The answer to this isn’t because I’m mentally unbalanced. OK, well maybe that’s part of it, but it’s mostly because it makes me happy. To have my hair appear to have been kissed by dappled sunlight is a mood booster extraordinaire.

So much so that during the economic downturn of 2008 I told my husband that I was 100% down with tightening our family budget. But there were two things I wouldn’t give up. One, was three ply toilet paper with a “comfort cushion.” By all means the rest of the family could use generic two ply but I, as the matriarch of the home, required Charmin.

But even more important than a quality toilet paper experience was getting my hair highlighted. That line item in the budget had to stay: forever. I’ll scrimp and save but some things had to remain sacrosanct.

This is why during the pandemic I sneaked out my house and had a clandestine meet-up with a hairstylist. At the back of a Target parking lot, with both of us masked and social distancing, the stylist handed me a “bleach kit” and toner in a paper bag. I, using a “claw” that extended 32 inches, reached for it and then raced home to begin “operation sun kissed streaks.”

When all was said and done my hair looked less sun streaked and more like a solar flare had exploded, proving that hairstylists are both artists and chemists. But at least when I looked in the mirror, I saw glimmers of gold strands, and amid all of the pandemic fear this brought me some happiness.

Last week, I was confessing to my daughter that I felt a tad glum and she asked me when I last had my hair highlighted.

“Of course, that’s the problem,” I said with a smile. “I was deficient in 30 volume bleach.”

Thankfully, I told her, I already had a hair appointment scheduled.

She laughed and then shared that the other day she also felt a little down so she went and got a spray tan.

“It turns out I wasn’t depressed. I just needed to be hosed down with beets, water and bronzer,” she said.

“Beets?”

“Yeah, beets. Well, beet extract. The sugar in it reacts with your skin and gives you a fake tan.”

Aww, it’s a wonderful thing when a mother and daughter can bond over the mood-boosting power of beauty treatments. It is, in fact, a ritual as old as time. To quote my mom: “Never underestimate the power of a good hair day or a red lipstick.”

Reach Sherry Kuehl at snarkyinthesuburbs@gmail.com, on Facebook at Snarky in the Suburbs, on Twitter at @snarkynsuburbs on Instagram @snarky.in.the.suburbs, and snarkyinthesuburbs.com.

This story was originally published April 17, 2024 at 5:00 AM.