AGE-DEFYING HAIRCARE
“I FEEL THE SAME GRATITUDE
FOR MY LONG HAIR AS MOST WOMEN
FEEL FOR THEIR LBD”
Celia Walden, owner of some seriously lustrous locks, ponders why hair is just so
important to women. 32-year-old Celia lives in London with her fiancé Piers Morgan
When I was six, my brother
tried to shampoo my hair
with Airfix glue. I remember
being rushed to the local
hairdressers, where a genial lady of
4x4 proportions removed the
offending clump and a small plastic
battleship – along with most of my
hair. Rather than develop a deepseated
resentment of both my
brother and semi-permanent
adhesives, I’ve mistrusted large genial
ladies and hairdressers ever since.
Transference, I think they call it.
At school, the girls with long
honeyed locks twisted into Hello
Kitty scrunchies would enquire politely
‘Are you a boy or a girl?’ Muttering my
reply through gritted teeth, I conjured
up a day when I could be like them.
Twenty-five years on, my hair is just
like their coveted locks (although
admittedly the Hello Kitty scrunchies
are now reserved solely for bath time).
I feel the same gratitude for my long
hair now as most women feel for their
foolproof LBD – the one that never lets
them down no matter how vicious the
bout of self-loathing. Running a brush
through what Martin Luther King once
called ‘the richest ornament of women,’
is an unparalleled pleasure – and one
I never tire of. While the rest of me
pretends to be capable, businesslike
– even hard, at times – my hair remains
a frivolous, feminine frill I’d feel
exposed without. I love the feral smell
of it in the heat, the way it tickles my
bare back and shoulders but keeps my
neck warm in winter, and I love how
useful a curtain it is with which to hide
from work colleagues on the Tube, or
once-kissed men at parties.
If I were a man, I’d keep a close eye
on my woman’s coiffure, hair being a
more accurate mood barometer than
almost anything else. At university,
friends would point out that my mane
would inflate with flirtation. They were
right: when talking to a boy I liked,
I would unwittingly run my hands
through it until I resembled an extra
from a Robert Palmer video. Which is
why men should be aware if their
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girlfriend/wife returns from a girls’ night
with a Cindy Crawford bouffant – she’s
in the initial stages of an affair. There
are the more obvious signs, of course:
if she goes for the chop, he might be in
for it too, and if she stops washing it as
frequently as she once did, there may
be self-esteem issues at stake. But far
more dangerous, is the female wrath
incurred by a bad hairdresser.
While understanding that hair admin
is a necessity, I begrudge every second
of it. If that time is used and wasted
to bad effect, my anger knows no
bounds. Look around hairdressers or
beauticians and you’ll see two distinct
breeds of women: those who gorge on
the stroking and petting (this lot rarely
have those pesky little things called
jobs) and those there to have their
looks improved in the briefest and most
competent manner possible.
Part of the latter group, I had
always assumed that the relationship
women claimed to have with their
“Hair is the key
to our soul. The
one beauty asset
a woman never
takes off”
hairdressers was a mythical one. For
years I would go to the nearest possible
establishment, paying between £16 and
£60 for a blow-dry (with no apparent
correlation in the quality department)
rarely feeling either happy or unhappy
as I left. Then I discovered Daniel
Galvin. In their George Street salon, I’m
processed with ruthless efficiency by
Vicky Thear, while I strum away on my
laptop, work through the full panoply of
the day’s papers and enjoy a delicious
breakfast or lunch to boot. By the time
I’m disgorged onto the street, it’s
in the perfectly tousled state of
Gisele beachside – without a hint
of the so-‘done’-it’s-crispy look which
so ages women.
I’ve been unfaithful a couple of
times (‘it meant nothing’, I’ll tell Vicky
later, ‘they weren’t even as good as
you’) – always when abroad and lonely
– and God has punished me
accordingly. My biggest mistake was
running down to a little place in
Beverly Hills on the night of the
Oscars, where a drippingly
obsequious man wound 62
small round brushes into
my hair, before trying
unsuccessfully to
remove them using
brisk, backcombing
motions. Two and a
half hours and six angry
text messages from my
boyfriend later, I ran livid,
my hair shredded, back to the
hotel. ‘It’s not that bad,’ soothed
my boyfriend in the cab on the
way there. ‘It’s got a bit of a
Courtney Love feel to it.’ From
that moment on, the night was
pretty much irredeemable.
‘Hair is our unspoken personality,’
Galvin explains. ‘It is the key to our
soul. Besides, a woman’s hair is the
one beauty asset she never takes
off.’ Which is perhaps why many of
us relish it the way we do – besides
which, young women are all too
conscious of the fact that once we
reach middle-age, our hairstyles
will be dictated not by what looks
prettiest, but by what is neat and
acceptable. It is pointless to fight
against this: there’s nothing worse
than a woman over 50 playing the
girlish card. But until I’m forced to
cut it off, I intend to enjoy its
changing form (and disguising that
form) in the same way that I intend
to enjoy my age. The marvellously
venomous French designer, Hubert
de Givenchy, was right when he said,
‘Essentially, hairstyle is the final
tip-off on whether or not a
woman really knows herself.’
CELIA WALDEN: SAVES
HER HELLO KITTY
SCRUNCHIES
FOR THE TUB PHOTOGRAPHY��GREG�CONRAUX/FOLIO-ID�COM��REX�FEATURES��TELEGRAPH�SYNDICATION
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