The style counsel

IN MY local Spar I discovered a magazine called Blonde Hair. The shop stocks a limited range of mags so Blonde Hair must be pretty significant (ie, people must actually buy and read it). What next? Blue Eyes magazine? Big Feet Weekly? The mag's strapline reads, "Because blondes do have more fun". But do they really?

Nearly 200 pages are stuffed with advice and ads for the billions of products required to "keep your colour gleaming". Being blonde looks like hellish hard work.

Actually, I have a deep-rooted problem with hair magazines of any description. There's never anything to read, apart from endless captions along the lines of, "The hair was teased with gel/spray/wax for added texture" (the word texture appears at least three times per page).

The styles are either completely barking, or unachievable unless you're prepared to get up at 4.30am in order to fit in two hours' worth of hair ironing.

Even the pics of celebrities with covetable dos have no relevance in the real world.

Who feels completely comfortable waltzing into their salon clutching a photo of Cameron Diaz or Nicole Kidman? My own hairdresser would, I'm sure, fall about clutching himself. The most positive comment I received when showing a stylist a snipped-out picture was, "I don't think that will work with your, um, face shape."

My own hair is neither blonde nor brunette. It's unremarkable, in- between hair. Several years ago, frustrated with its unwillingness to do anything interesting, I ventured into a highly fashionable London salon. The hairdresser sighed deeply, grabbed handfuls of doleful locks and said, "Know what your problem is?" He was so handsome - in the Brad Pitt league of handsome - that I was rendered virtually speechless. So, it appeared, was my hair. "It's just not saying anything, " he announced.

He started to slice at my hair while dancing wildly around me. His flamboyant cutting style was alarming - like a kind of performance art - but I told myself to relax and to trust him. This cut was costing me a fortune. He had to know what he was doing.

Next to me, a girl who'd just been signed to Models One had been treated to an elfin crop. She looked spectacular. My own hair fell to the floor in soft clumps. I felt quite bereaved and desperately wanted it back - like when you hand in an old battered jacket to the charity shop, and see someone else stroking it and trying it on.

You want to scream, "That's my jacket!" and snatch it back.

Having chopped my hair severely short, the manic chopper decided I needed some colour. He poured me a glass of wine, which I chugged down in one gulp, and announced that my new do would "really make a statement".

"Great, " I said warily. I'd had short cuts before, and could live with it - even though some wisecracker had once said that cropped hair made me look like Mark King out of Level 42. Dreamboat stylist painted on the colour. "What do you think?" he asked a whole lifetime later.

"It's black, " I managed. I felt like crying. Although I tried not to look, all I could see was this morbid black shape in shop windows. I looked like a corpse, or a waxwork. The hairdresser had kept the fringe long enough to ensure that ugly black clumps kept appearing in the periphery of my vision. I felt like I'd chucked a safe, reliable boyfriend and only just realised how idiotic I'd been. I bought wine, cigarettes and a massive straw hat.

You feel silly, crying over a botched haircut because it's such a pathetically girlie thing to do - like being scared of spiders or incapable of putting oil in the car. It's only hair, for goodness, sake. It can be re-cut and re-coloured. It grows.

I arrived home with a damp, blotchy face. Then-boyfriend was lounging on the sofa, eager to view the new do. "Take off that stupid hat, " he ordered. I took it off.

Boyfriend's mouth set rigid, like he was trying to stop wild laughter from tumbling out.

"It's not that bad, " he managed, which is hardly a phrase to boost a woman's self-esteem. It ranks alongside, "It'll be okay when it settles down, " whatever that means.

"Say I look like Mark King, " I said, "and I'll leave you."

He said I did, in fact, look like someone very famous. I started to feel a bit better. Maybe the crazed cutter had been right, and was fully deserving of his title of 'hair artiste'. I'd been dreary Mousey Head for too long.

"Beatrice Dalle?" I asked hopefully, knowing she was boyfriend's lust-object.

"No!"

"Lisa Stansfield?" I asked, more desperately.

I blame the disastrous cut for the demise of our relationship. It's very hard, I feel, to live with someone who keeps calling you Hitler.

Fiona Gibson's novel, Wonderboy, is published by Flame, 10.99

Copyright 2004 SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
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