Haunted by the hair mistakes of her past, she’s taught her daughter to do better

As a parent you want your children to avoid making the same mistakes you did. Even now with my kids in their mid- to late 20s, I’m still dispersing wisdom under the banner of “for the love of all that is holy, don’t do what I did.”

No where is my advice more, I guess, voluminous than in the category of hair, subcategory the maintenance of and trends to avoid. Luckily for my son, his short locks get him a pass on all things hair related. Sadly, this is not the case for my daughter. Alas, she has received the mother lode of all my hard-earned follicle knowledge.

This poor child has had to listen to years of me sharing all the ways I have tortured my hair. I’ll admit to even making a couple of my tales of tress distress into riveting bedtime stories.

I did all this to create cautionary tales that would guide my daughter into treating her hair with the dignity it deserves. All of my stories center on my hair disasters over the years. These tales are not only riveting but terrifying.

Personally, the hair tragedy (yes, tragedy) that still haunts me is the one and only time I got a perm. Not just any perm mind you, but a home perm in my aunt’s kitchen. It was almost five decades ago, but I can still smell the perm juice. It’s a hard aroma to forget.

Sure, the technical explanation is that the chemical reaction of ingredients like ammonium thioglycolate breaking down the hair’s disulfide bonds creates an “odor.” The not so scientific take on the process is that you’re frying your scalp with a liquid concoction that’s conjured up the smell of a thousand rotting corpses.

The end result was that my hair looked like the love child of the Bride of Frankenstein and the demonic doll Chucky. Portions of my hair were corkscrew curls, other parts were wavy and then some of my hair seemed to have rebuked the perm and remained straight.

My mother, unaware that her sister was perming my hair, had a level of rage upon seeing my new “do” that was quite possibly scarier than my hair. Family lore has it that my mom screamed, “you’ve maimed my daughter” and then she started hitting my aunt with a dish towel.

The next horrendous hair saga was totally self-inflicted. It was the late ‘70s and spray-in hair lightener was all the rage. You just gave your hair a few spritzes of this magic potion, lay out in the sun (preferably with your skin smothered in Hawaiian Tropic Dark Tanning Oil) and, voila, after an hour or two you would have blonde hair.

I’m going to say that the manufacturer of this product probably had a different or perhaps wider definition of the term blonde or the color wheel in general. This is because my brown hair turned bright orange. I could have played Ronald McDonald and not needed to wear a wig.

Thankfully, there was a hair stylist in town who specialized in “problem cases,” and the orange was vanquished.

I’d like to report that after experiencing these two episodes of hair trauma I learned my lesson and there are no more tales to tell. Unfortunately, that is not the case. There are many more stories of hair highlights going rogue, the bob haircut that made me look like Lord Farquaad from “Shrek,” and the time I got bangs (I cried for days).

The good news is that my daughter has not repeated any of my mistakes. Her hair remains untouched by perm juice or bleach. I totally think it’s thanks to all of those bedtime stories.

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