Congratulations to Julie and Wordbird – randomly chosen as the winners of Tressed to Kill!
Guest post by Lila Dare: Tressed to Kill
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By Lila Dare
Take another swallow of coffee—we’re starting with a quiz.
True or False: Americans spend more money annually on hair care products than the GDP of Cambodia, Iceland and Albania combined.
True or False: There are fifty dollars spent on finding a cure for baldness for every one dollar spent on finding a cure for malaria.
End of quiz. Whew. Sit back, inhale caffeine, run your fingers through your hair. Both statements are true. Americans spend approximately $38 billion dollars a year on hair care products, according to 2006 figures. (My numbers are a tad out of date. Sue me) And Bill Gates supplied the baldness/malaria ratio to a Stanford audience in 2008. I trust Bill has his numbers right.
Let’s face it: as a culture, we’re obsessed with hair. We dye, cut, style, mousse, gel, spike, brush, blow-dry, add extensions, curl, comb, and braid it. We cringe away from mirrors on bad hair days and devote more hours to sitting in styling chairs than to cleaning our bathrooms. (Okay, that may only apply to some of us.) We describe people (mostly female) by the one word of their hair color. “The blonde jogged on the beach.” “That brunette over there.” You get the idea. Why do we define ourselves by our hair?
I started thinking about hair while I was writing TRESSED TO KILL, the first in my Southern Beauty Shop mystery series from Berkley Prime Crime. I think of it as “Steel Magnolias with dead bodies.” My protagonist, Grace Terhune, works in her mother’s salon, Violetta’s, in the coastal town of fictional St. Elizabeth, Georgia. Three other women, ranging in age from seventeen to sixty, work with them. I realized early on that when I visualize these women, their hair takes center stage. Violetta has short, gray-and-white hair, gently spiked with gel so she resembles a kindly Beatrix Potter hedgehog. Rachel, the high-schooler, has Goth-black hair that looks like she hacked at it with toenails clippers. Stella, the manicurist, has long, auburn hair, and Althea, Violetta’s best friend and the salon’s aesthetician, has a gray-flecked Afro (until a new boyfriend in the second book, POLISHED OFF, persuades her to get in touch with her African roots). Grace, my thirty-year-old main character, has shoulder-length, light-brown hair but gets something of a makeover mid-way through the book.
When we re-invent ourselves, the first thing we do is change our hair. As a child, I had a pixie cut that I hated, but my mom insisted on it. I got revenge by playing “salon” with Suzette, the little girl next door, and chopping off her waist-length black hair. In my teens and early twenties, I had the mandatory long hair of the 1980s. For most of my adult life, though, I’ve worn my hair short and satisfied my urge for change with highlights or demi-permanent dyes (I’ve always been too leery of roots to go with a permanent dye) in various shades of red. Short hair makes me feel confident, edgy, in control. (I may not be able to make my twelve-year-old stop rolling her eyes at me, or lose five pounds, but by golly, I can make two inches of hair do what I want it to do. Mostly.)
How does your hair affect your vision of who you are? What’s the most drastic thing you’ve ever done with your hair? Best hair story gets a free copy of TRESSED TO KILL!
Two people can win Tressed to Kill by answering Lila’s questions in the comments. Please answer by Monday, May 10 at 11:59 PM CST.
Well, probably the most immediate reaction I made with my hair was to demand my housemate cut my long hair off after a disastrous encounter with a chap. When I gave him the ‘I just had my heart broken’ brush-off, he said I looked like a wounded animal and he loved my long shiny hair. He gave me the heebee-jeebies and those locks had to go! 🙂
But for a ‘twist of Fate’ story, there’s the fact that suffering from serious hairloss led to me finally getting a gynae check up after decades of avoiding having my Pap Smear tests. Turns out my hair falls out because of PCOS but the smear test showed I was on the verge of developing cervical cancer and ended up having a hysterectomy to prevent this. So hairloss led to early diagnosis and a happy outcome. (Regaine (Minoxidil) has brought my hair back pretty well too.)
Wow, Wordbird, what a story! Hurray for your happy outcomes (no cancer and hair growing back! Thanks for commenting.
If I’m having a bad hair day it makes me have a bad hair day because I lose confidence in myself. I once colored it myself and it bleached like crazy! I’ll never color my hair at home again.
I use to live next to a beautician. She agreed to “lighten” my hair one evening but didn’t have a lot of time to do it. She put the color in, sent me home with instructions to wash it out in 10 minutes. OMG… my hair was absolutely white. I ran back to her house in a panic and spent the next hours trying to get color back into my hair. To say the least, it didn’t work. For the next six months, every time I washed my hair I had to put the “shampoo-in” color in it just to tone the white down. I looked like a freak. My hair was like straw from trying so many products. It took many years before I ever tried a color product again.
I had grown my hair out long for my wedding day and actually didn’t have it that short prior so my fiance/husband was used to it longer. The day after we got married we were in the mall and I told him I wanted my haircut for the honeymoon. He walked around the mall and when he came back I had cut my hair down to a spikey/flipped up do’! His reaction was less than thrilled, but he got used to it and now I keep it pretty short all the time!
After 7 years with below-the-shoulder length hair in a ponytail – which was my solution for hiding my gray – I chopped it off to just below the chin. People tell me they love the skunky white stripe in my hair, but the truth is, I’m not brave: just too LAZY to color it! And I’ve learned to tame it with a flat iron, but it’s long again, and I’m ready for a new look that’s more “bed head”.
OMG! The perms in the 80’s and 90’s. My baby fine, thin hair hated them. Why did I do that!!!!!!
My hair was once short and spikey!! YIKES!
My mom let my neighbor cut my hair when I was ten years old and she gave me crooked bangs. Two weeks later, I had to have school pictures taken. My mom still loves to pull out those pictures and tease me about it.
Goodness, ladies, those are some scary hair stories. I must admit that the bravest I’ve been with chemical products on my hair is those dyes that wash out gradually over about 28 shampoos. I do use those every now and then to freshen up the red in my hair which has gotten browner as I’ve aged. Thanks for sharing your stories with me!
I have to thank you for the great book, which I have thoroughly enjoyed.
I should come clean on something: I’m a writer by trade, and a thriller/mystery nut, so I’m really hard to please. This book was excellent, both well-written (high praise from a fellow word-engineer) and well-plotted, with believable and interesting characters who develop and unfold as the story moves along. I’m notorious for guessing “whodunnit” and seeing all the clues that are dropped into books en route, but this time I couldn’t guess the culprit and I ended up sitting up late to finish the last chapter. I’ll be looking out for the next one in the series because I so want to see what happens next to Grace and Violetta and the gang.
Many thanks and all best wishes. Lisa x