Getting the Pretty Back

by Molly Ringwald

  Though I have dabbled in extensions, they have always felt like a cheat. The act of growing your hair out requires qualities that you don’t need when getting a head full of extensions. (The only quality that you really need for the latter is a couple grand to burn.) Growing your hair out for real requires patience, lots and lots of it, as well as plenty of humility. Every couple of months you go through a stage of horror and dismay, and the temptation to cut it all off is one that I have rarely withstood.

  When I was a teenager, the time when we all start making serious statements about our style, I decided that I was not going to be one of those “long hair” girls. This decision was sine qua non, as I had realized the futility of trying to look like what passed for beautiful in Southern California in the early eighties: long blond hair, blue eyes, tawny skin. I figured that if I couldn’t look like that, I was better off creating my own look and embracing it. I looked to the past for inspiration. Louise Brooks for the bob in Pretty in Pink. A picture of Susan Strasberg for the hair in The Breakfast Club. And then one day I saw Jean Seberg in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, and it was hairstyle love at first sight. I promptly went to the hairdresser with a photo of Jean Seberg clutched in my hand. (I could have just as easily brought a picture of Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, but Jean’s was first, and it also had the Frenchy expatriate allure.)

  “Are you sure you want it this short?” my hairdresser asked

  “Yes.”

  “But this volume looks great on you,” she said, fluffing my hair into an eighties poof. “You sure you want to lose all that?”

  I insisted, and in an hour I lost all of my overprocessed eighties frizz. I had never felt so free and unfettered. By this point in my life, I had become fairly famous and already felt the burden of expectation. Cutting my hair like Jean Seberg’s felt deliciously provocative. Even now, I consider this hairdo an expression of extreme confidence. It says, “I like my face so much, I’m not afraid to show it to you.” It also says, “I’m not spending an hour with the blow-dryer and hair products,” something that most men, ever impatient about women’s grooming, should like—although ironically I’ve found most men don’t like the Jean Seberg look.

  BEST ICONIC HAIRSTYLES IN FILM

  Jean Seberg in Breathless

  What else is there to say about this look that hasn’t been said (especially by me)? An eternal classic.

  Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour

  In a lot of ways, Deneuve is the French version of Hitchcock’s classic blond ice queen. Hair back in a twist until she’s ravished, and then it’s down. Hard to argue with this one.

  Brigitte Bardot in And God Created Woman

  Best example of boyfriend hair there is. Almost impossible to achieve this look without hair extensions.

  Pam Grier in Foxy Brown

  There is no statement quite like Pam’s hot powerful Afro. White people tried to jump on the bandwagon in the seventies, but if you don’t have the hair or the attitude, don’t bother.

  Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde

  Long sleek bob, beret optional.

  Rita Hayworth in Gilda

  Even in black and white you can tell this lady is a redhead. She sports the same peekaboo hairstyle that Veronica Lake made famous, but Rita’s looks undone and far sexier.

  Yvonne Elliman in Jesus Christ Superstar

  Sexy, long-layered, hippie, windswept razor cut.

  Louise Brooks in everything

  The inspiration for everything from Something Wild to Pulp Fiction.

  I was riding my short-hair high. Most everyone found it attractive—or let’s put it this way, no one went out of their way to tell me otherwise. Most people. Years later I ran into Emilio Estevez, whom I hadn’t seen in years. We exchanged a mutual rundown of what had occupied us over the years. And then came his parting words to me:

  “Never cut your hair short again.”

  “Um…thanks, Emilio.”

  You never really know how fast your hair grows until you get a short haircut that you would like to keep. (Conversely, you never realize how long it takes to grow your hair until you decide to grow out a bad haircut.) A few weeks after the success of my first Breathless homage, I went back to the same hair salon but got a different stylist. I didn’t have my Jean Seberg snapshot with me but figured that the hairdresser could just follow the lines of the previous cut. This is a mistake that I have never since repeated. NEVER go to see a different stylist if you are happy with your hair. Hairstylists always like to leave their mark on a style. That’s why they are called stylists. Some prefer to be called artists. This one, however, could have been called a sadist. Faster than you could say Nouvelle Vague my cute little pixie cut became my “first-week-at-boot-camp” cut or the “I-don’t-have-lice-anymore” cut.

  “You can so pull this off!” my stylist trilled as he sheared my head. It happened so fast! I sat there stunned as I watched the whole look go from cute to severe, from supremely confident to “Don’t ask me why my head is shaved, the answer might be sad.”

  It took all of five minutes. I couldn’t say a word, too stunned to speak.

  Until he took out the electric shears.

  “Please stop!” I cried. “It’s short enough, don’t you think?”

  He leaned on one hip, holding the shaver in his upturned palm like a martini glass.

  “I just wanted to clean up all that fuzz on your neck. But if you want to keep it…”

  “I want the fuzz. Thank you. Please leave the fuzz,” I murmured, taking off the cape. “It’s OK. I have to go now.”

  I paid the bill, somehow managing to hold back tears until I got to the car with my boyfriend. We drove around for about an hour while he tried to talk me out of whatever self-destructive thoughts I was having. “You look beautiful…You don’t look all that different.” Somehow his words finally did the trick. Then I made the mistake of stopping by my parents’ house on the way home to pick up a dress for an event that I had that night. The reason why I was getting a trim in the first place.

  I knocked on the door, since I couldn’t find my key. My mother answered the door. She took one look at me and gasped.

  “It’s OK,” she said. “We’ll get a wig!”

  CUT? WAIT…

  As tempting as it may be to radically shear yourself when a big and difficult moment arises in your life, many of the times you’re left afterward still feeling bad—and almost bald. Here are some classic moments in life when it might be better to think twice before reaching for the scissors.

  A BREAKUP: Perhaps the most enticing time, it can also be the most disastrous. As traumatic as it is to end a relationship, why compound it by tempting the hair gods to leave you shorn and miserable? This is a good time to hold on to your security blanket hair for a bit until you get your pretty back.

  CHILDBIRTH: Wait until after you lose the baby weight! Especially before cutting bangs—they make your face look fuller, and really, is that the help you need right now?

  BEFORE A JOB INTERVIEW: Opt for a professional blow-dry rather than an actual haircut. It’s not the time for a radical makeover. Confidence is key here, and you don’t want to run the risk of feeling like you are someone else.

  YOUR WEDDING: This is the very worst time to cut your hair! There should be a strict “no-cut policy” in place at least two to three months leading up to your wedding. Those wedding photos last forever, and there are no retakes. This should also extend to your significant other. Unbeknownst to me, my husband took an impromptu trip to an overzealous barber before our wedding. His hair was so short that his scalp was positively radiant—but not in a good way.

  It took me years to cure myself of the urge to “Seberg” myself every time a relationship ended, I didn’t get a part I wanted, or I was just plain bored. I think it actually took moving to France, learning French, and getting cast as an American in a French movie, Enfants de Salaud, to rid me of the desire.

  “What deed you do?” the French writer/
director asked in horror when I first showed up for rehearsal. When she had met me, six months earlier, my hair had been shoulder length. “Zee hairs were long,” she said. “I saw zee character with un chignon. Pulled tight. Très severe, you know? Like one of zee American women from CNN.”

  Not exactly what I had in mind for the character. I was envisioning Godard and his most romantic vision of America, Jean Seberg in Breathless. The director was picturing a newscaster. An overly made-up clownish character. A caricature of an American.

  “Um…I could wear a wig?” I offered, channeling my mom from way back.

  “Oh…no no no. Zee wigs look not real. Not like zee real hairs.”

  This, incidentally, is something creepy that the French do. They refer to hair as “hairs,” which makes linguistic sense, since the French word for hair, les cheveux, is plural. But there is something that just sounds horrible about “hairs.” When I think of “hairs” I think of a couple of random hairs, just sort of sprouting on your head or out of your ears. Not a pretty image.

  “Ah, OK,” she said, shrugging her shoulders exaggeratedly, and blew air from her lips. “So your hairs are short. Tant pis.”

  Tant pis is a French expression used ad nauseum to express a sort of vague regret. It isn’t a huge deal, nothing to go to the courts over just sort of…disappointing. It can be translated roughly as “too bad” or “oh well.” I noticed during my years in France that this was a phrase that falls off the French tongue with regularity. It seems the French are disappointed a lot. But on the flip side, they seem to deal with tragedy with the same semiblasé, sanguine demeanor. The most extreme example of this being the story of a friend of mine who ended up adopting the eight-year-old daughter of a local woman who had passed away. The way the young French girl described her life was, “My mother died. Tant pis.” I never knew whether to admire the girl’s resilience in dealing with her life in such a laissez-faire attitude or to be horrified by it. It certainly made me remember the phrase and to marvel at the wide range of instances with which the phrase could be employed. I don’t think the French Revolution could have happened today. Most likely everyone would philosophize about the aristocracy and then shrug and say “tant pis.”

  Right now my hair is longer than it’s ever been in my life. I’m alternately proud (what patience!) and embarrassed—embarrassed because of the many conversations I’ve had with girlfriends about “boyfriend hair.” Boyfriends, as we’ve decided, are suckers for long hair. Sure, you might find the occasional exception—the director Spike Jonze apparently lists short hair as his first requirement for a girl—but, in general, take your average guy and ask him what he likes on a woman and he’ll say long hair. My friends and I have argued at length about why this might be, offering up everything from childhood infatuations to hard-core Freudian analysis, from evolutionary biology to biblical narrative (Samson never did get over that haircut, the little baby). Whatever the reason, or reasons, may be, as a woman it’s a little disappointing that no matter how inventive or daring you might get in the salon, you’re most likely to encounter just a polite shrug from your guy.

  “Men are simple,” my husband insists. “It’s an on-off switch. Long hair is on.”

  I don’t think it’s that easy. For me, the analogy is more like a restaurant. Long hair is the thing they’re used to, the old favorite, the classic dish. But do they really want to order spaghetti and meatballs every night? Why not branch out? If they would just try the veal Milanese with shaved truffles, they would love it…

  COLOR THEORY

  Somewhere in all of the hair cutting and hair growing there is also the issue of color. I have a theory of hair color that is not unlike my overall theory of life. There is a magical color that you have around the age of five. If you can, never stray too far from this color, either by replicating it exactly—a nearly impossible feat, but a noble one to attempt—or by achieving the essence of this color with highlights. Ordinarily I’m wary to espouse any hard, rock-steady rules about style, but I think this one is a pretty good one. There are, of course, always some glaring exceptions to the rule—Marilyn Monroe and Madonna naturally come to mind—but the platinum hair set has its own book of rules and is exempt from these considerations.

  At age five, I had a honey-colored auburn that gradually darkened as I got older. When I was thirteen years old, I went to see the original Broadway production of Nine, starring Raúl Juliá. There was a number that the late actress Anita Morris performed in a net lace catsuit (created by the brilliant costume designer William Ivey Long), and her hair was stunning. A mass of fiery red. For the rest of the performance, it was all I could think about. Even after the show, I couldn’t get the image out of my head, and as soon as I returned to L.A., off to the hairdresser I went. (In fact, I hate to admit it, but I was so bewitched that I ditched school to spend the day at the hair salon.) That afternoon I showed up at home with a head full of Lucille Ball hair. My mother, bewildered by the new bright red me, didn’t even think to ask me how I had actually achieved this transformation at school. She just shook her head in dismay.

  “You can keep it for a month, then you have to go back to your natural color.”

  She was true to her word, and in a month I was in the hair salon again, dyeing my hair back. Then I ended up on a film set a few months later where they were trying to decide the look of my character. I was playing a little space urchin-pixie. The background was Moab, Utah, with its stunning copper arches.

  “What about red?” I piped up. “Like the color of the mountains?” I added, so as to sound as if I had carefully thought through my motivation.

  My hair was changed again that day, and I have never gone back. I’m a redhead, in coloring and personality. My own mother tsks disapprovingly any time I change my color for any reason.

  “You are meant to be a redhead,” she tells me. “I always said so.”

  FINDING THE PERFECT LIPSTICK

  (OR GETTING AS CLOSE AS YOU CAN…)

  From ancient Babylon to today, women have been fascinated by lipstick. Though the methods of production have drastically changed over the years—rumor has it Cleopatra crushed carmine beetles to achieve her color of choice, while another popular ingredient of the time was fish scales (mmm, kissable!) to add the iridescence needed for that shimmery “disco” look—the desire for finding just the right tint has never waned. even now, thousands of years since some enterprising woman first smeared carnauba wax on her lips and tried to shimmy past the bouncer at studio LIV, the quest endures: to find the perfect lipstick.

  For years my color of choice was crimson red, partly for the rebel in me that wanted to buck the oft-repeated cliché about redheads not being able to wear red, and also because the perfect red is essentially the holy grail of lipsticks. For a short while I thought that I had found it in a stick that was produced by Shiseido in the eighties, but alas my discovery was short-lived. it was discontinued and regrettably sent to the makeup graveyard along with Clinique’s Smudgecicles.

  Perhaps it was for the best since as we age it’s generally a good idea to stay away from the dark and heavy matte lipsticks and lean toward lip stains, balms, and glosses. Dark lipsticks just make you look older, which is probably why we liked them so much when we were younger! Skip the lip pencil that “matches” the lip color. It’s just one extra step that generally makes everything look more severe.

  Here are my absolute favorite lip colors that are still available. Make sure to apply sparingly, blot, and don’t forget to check your teeth. (Application with cleavage optional…)

  CHANEL CRÈME—VAMP

  NARS—BELLE DE JOUR

  CLINIQUE ALMOST LIPSTICK—BLACK HONEY

  YVES ST. LAURENT—FORBIDDEN BURGUNDY

  BENEFIT—BENETINT

  REVLON—CHERRIES IN THE SNOW

  L’OREAL—PINK LADY

  GIVENCHY—BEIGE CHAMPAGNE

  DIOR—SERUM DE ROUGE S10

  SHISEIDO—PERFECT ROUGE RS701

&nbs
p; MY FEW MISGUIDED MONTHS AS A BLONDE

  Once in a while, my career decides what hair color I’m to have. A few years back, I was cast in a period piece where my character was described as a cross between Judy Holiday and Marilyn Monroe. A blonde. There was always a suspicion I’d had that I might look good with blond hair. Both my siblings were towheads as children, so I figured that I should be able to carry blond hair. Every time I’d had the red stripped out of my hair and I’d looked in the mirror, inspecting the jaundiced face staring back at me, I’d think, Well, it’s just not the right shade of blond—I can’t take ash, or yellow. But maybe a different shade… So when this part came along I figured it was the perfect opportunity to find out, once and for all, if the secret to blond for me was going to be the shade. I was going platinum. It would be my chance to discover whether blondes really do have more fun.

  All I found out from the experience, however, was that blondes need to allow about forty-five extra minutes to do their makeup. I have never felt so self-conscious in my entire life. My brown eyes, which always looked soft and expressive, now looked like little stones wedged into my skull. My freckles, which previously blended perfectly with my various shades of red, looked blotchy and dirty. For the first time in my life, I found myself sneaking out of bed earlier so that my boyfriend didn’t see my face without makeup. For the first time I viewed my makeup as a mask rather than as something that discreetly enhances. And the worst part of it was that the same boyfriend (now husband) happened to love redheads, and we had been together for only a month when I went platinum.