The Clothes Make the Girl

by Brittany Gibbons

  Situations wherein it’s completely okay to ask me if I dye my hair:

  1. You are performing some sort of beauty process on me, making the environment fitting to discuss intimate matters about my beauty regime.

  2. We’re in the bathroom of a bar, and you’re holding my hair back while I throw up all the sugary umbrella drinks I shouldn’t have downed.

  3. You are a homicide detective and you are at my door holding a hair that you found at the scene of the crime.

  4. I’m channeling Effie Trinket and my hair is an unnatural color, such as pink or blue or green.

  Situations wherein it’s absolutely not okay to ask me if I dye my hair:

  When I am out somewhere in public and you get the hankering to inquire about my hair in front of my husband or just about anyone else on the planet.

  It’s not that it’s a secret or that my own husband doesn’t know that I dye my hair, but honestly, you and I don’t know each other. For all you know, you could be outing my number one confidence booster in front of a first date or potential boss. Why don’t you ask me if I stuff my bra or whether I had a nose job? The answer to both is no, by the way. The stuff in my bra isn’t for enhancement; it’s for survival should I get trapped in an emergency situation and need sustenance from the Skittles and popcorn trapped in there.

  Once, I was sitting in an Outback Steakhouse with my husband and a group of his international coworkers that I was meeting for the first time, and our server set down a few loaves of bread, turned to me, and loudly asked, “Oh my God, is your hair real or fake?”

  “It’s a better version of what comes out of my head.” I smiled. This has become my canned response in these instances.

  I was incredibly flattered to learn that she loved my hair, and I do love me some girl talk, but asking me in front of a table full of people isn’t the time. Instead, pull me aside when I am going to the bathroom for the ninth time, or stop me when we’re leaving.

  I know this sounds a little blown out of proportion and you are probably thinking, But Brittany, it’s just hair? And it is, I know, but as a fat girl, I’m ridiculously protective of my locks, and have been all my life. I had to be, I grew up believing it was all I had going for me and that it was my only beauty qualifier.

  Fat girls give good hair and have pretty faces. We’ve heard it a million times.

  I was very blessed to have two aunts in my family who were amazing hair stylists, and it’s from them I learned not only how to take care of my mane, but how I could use it as an access point for laying down a personal style.

  From junior high on, I spent an extraordinary amount of time in these hair wizards’ salon chairs. Glossing over the various poorly chosen perms I requested, I’m going to confidently call it: I had one of the best heads of hair in my school. My thick waves were a great foundation for withstanding all the bleaching, coloring, and hacking into them we did on a monthly basis.

  I had short messy layers like Drew Barrymore in Mad Love, nineties baby bangs like Janeane Garofalo in Reality Bites, and long curly red hair like Marissa Ribisi in the box-office smash The Brady Bunch Movie. I was a chameleon and I loved that. I may not have been able to express my personality as effectively as I wanted with fashion, but hair always fits.

  So to answer your question, I wasn’t always a redhead. Just sometimes.

  I first dyed my hair copper-red in junior high school. I was so excited to surprise my then boyfriend, Vince. But when I walked up behind him and put my arms around his waist, he turned around, backed away, and asked me why I looked like Peg Bundy. He and the friend he was with erupted in laughter.

  Not really what you want to hear from the guy who fingers you in the back of the theater during Lethal Weapon, at least not at the time. Now that I’m older I realize Peg Bundy had a bangin’ body and great hair. Thirty-six-year-old Brittany would high-five her boyfriend for the comment. She would also then promptly break up with him because she doesn’t date guys who don’t clean under their fingernails and try to make her feel bad about her hair.

  I may have been born a dirty blonde, but being a ginger is in my blood. My grandmother had gorgeous auburn hair. I remember watching her lose it in her hands as she went through chemotherapy, hiding her emerging scalp beneath colorful scarves and wraps. It’s one of those odd things you often think about when someone passes away. I miss my grandma’s hair, and the smell of her brand of shampoo.

  I didn’t stay red for long in junior high, quickly cycling through ever-lighter shades of platinum blond to offset my darker eyebrows, which I plucked into thin, reclining commas. Bleach-blond hair was the language of teenagers in the late nineties and early two thousands. Girls showed off the chunky highlights made popular by denim-clad superstars who marched their way down an MTV red carpet, and frosted tips were a dreamy-boy-band calling card. We were on the wrong side of hair history, and I’m not proud of it.

  On any normal day, I estimate Andy to give less than two shits about my hair, and I am completely okay with that. I can come home from the salon and he may or may not notice, and that’s fine. The only reason I know when he trims his beard is because he leaves all the hair in the sink like a molting bird.

  I think we are both really good about knowing what the other likes, and live by a general set of rules we laid out on our wedding night. Vows, if you will. Honestly, we were too drunk and exhausted to consummate our new marriage, so we just collapsed on our bed fully dressed and wrote out silly promises to each other until we had to leave for the airport and catch the flight to our honeymoon.

  “Promise me we’ll always want to have sex with one another,” he wrote.

  “Promise me you’ll always think I’m the funniest girl you know.”

  “Promise me you’ll never make me sell my car for a minivan.”

  We went back and forth laughing, completely unaware that you can’t accurately make these sorts of predictions when you are twenty-three years old with no children or debt.

  “Promise me you’ll never ask me if I really need to order two eggrolls,” I wrote.

  “Promise me you’ll never get a short mom haircut,” he scribbled in all caps.

  “Promise me you’ll pretend you don’t notice when I poop.”

  “Promise me you won’t use my razor to shave your pubic hair.”

  Let me tell you . . . that last one? There’s probably quite a market for guys in prison who’d be into that sort of thing, and I’d look into it more if you were allowed to mail razors jammed with pubes to inmates. Just sayin’.

  To date, we’ve kept the majority of these promises to each other. Even with three kids, neither of us drives a van and Andy still pretends the bathroom doesn’t smell like a lit match when I walk out. However, the razor thing was a deal breaker. Andy’s razor is so much sharper than mine, and if it’s a choice between ending up with a vagina that looks like Michael Chiklis or Deadpool, I’m choosing Chiklis.

  Up until this point, my hair has largely been a nonissue in our relationship. I had been sticking to dark chestnut shades, attempting to look exotic next to Andy’s dark skin and black hair, a task I had taken over doing at home with boxed color. This would be mistake number one. I am not made to have dark brown hair. My skin is too fair and the inky hues washed me out and made me look green. This was further confirmed when I caught Andy Photoshopping a tan onto my skin in one of our wedding pictures. This is a man who had previously had a soul patch and wore gold chains with the Nike symbol hanging from them. If he was concerned about my grooming choices, something had to be horribly amiss.

  The second broken promise happened shortly after the birth of our daughter. Here I was, coming off decades of being on top of my hair game, and then a moment of weakness, exhaustion, and sleep deprivation caused me to do the exact thing I always swore I wouldn’t do . . . I got a mom haircut.

  I walked into the salon like a zombie; I smelled like spoiled milk and war. My stained nursing top was damp against my chest and my long dark hair
was thrown into a knotted ball behind my head. It was obvious that someone who looks like me shouldn’t be making long-term decisions. But then everyone is so nice to you at the salon, asking about the baby, squeezing your shoulders in fellowship, massaging your scalp a little extra at the shampoo bowl. I was drunk on pampering and People magazines.

  I don’t remember what happened after that. I just remember standing up, seeing a mountain of hair on the floor, and the stylist escorting me to the desk as she fed me platitudes in her soothing radio DJ voice.

  “This is going to save you so much time.”

  “Your hair is so much healthier now.”

  “Your baby won’t even recognize you.”

  “It will be so much easier.”

  The haircut was horrible. I had walked into the salon with hair that fell below my shoulder blades and left with a choppy short bob that sat above my chin; like a Dorothy Hamill with more layers. I could no longer pull it back into a ponytail, it was hard to style in any manner outside of matronly, and it aged me at least a decade. And let’s get real, there was nothing “easier” about it. When my hair was long, I could simply braid it or toss it up before leaving the house. Having short hair meant I had to actually style it every day, adding even more time and annoyance to my already struggling self-maintenance routine.

  It’s because of that cut that I stopped cutting and coloring my hair for four years. I went off the grid and all natural. I looked like the before photo of the people whose friends drag them onto daytime talk shows for offensive ambush makeovers. Those poor souls think they are just headed for some freebies as members of the studio audience. Little do they know Wendy Williams is about to pull them onstage and tell them they look like a cross between Rumpelstiltskin and Cruella de Vil.

  A few years ago, I spent a week in New York City shooting the fall plus-size clothing campaign for Lands’ End. It was my first “big-deal” photo shoot, and I was brought on as the spokesmodel for the campaign based on the various viral body-positivity movements I’d been launching online. I didn’t know anything about modeling outside of what I’d picked up from America’s Next Top Model, but the experience with Lands’ End changed my life. I was able to meet with designers and participate in catalog styling and model fittings. It was the moment when I stopped being a passenger on the plus-size fashion train and became one of its most vocal conductors.

  While preparing me for my photo shoot, the stylist blowing out my hair commented, “You have the most dramatic ombré dye job I have ever seen.” And I smiled, thanking her in a way that assured her that yes, my ombré hair was totally happening on purpose. But in my head, I was suddenly hyperaware that my hair was no longer reading as natural, but as a fading trend I had somehow slacked my way into.

  The spotlight only increased following that shoot. I was approached by more fashion brands, and the more I was thrust into the spotlight, the more insecure I began to feel. Not about my body, but about being forgettable. I was a completely average-looking curvy woman, trying desperately to spread a memorable message about loving your body and reinventing how society sees beauty.

  The problem was that once I left the stage or a segment on a morning show would end, a trendy celebrity would come out and nobody would remember the curvy girl with Topanga hair and bad roots.

  Much the way I learned that dramatic headlines baited readers to learn about loving themselves—FAT GIRL WEARS BIKINI, CHUBBY WOMAN HAS SEX EVERY DAY FOR A YEAR, PLUS-SIZE LADY STRIPS ON TED STAGE—I realized that having a provocative look would help me stand out and brand my message.

  “Brand” feels like a dirty word these days, but let’s face it—so many successful people are known for their signature look. Anna Wintour has her chin-length bob, Steve Jobs had his black mock turtlenecks, Elton John has his sunglasses . . . these are things that we see and immediately connect to that person.

  I ran through a few scenarios. Maybe I could always wear a sweater with a giant B on the front, or wear bright red lipstick. I could try an old English monocle, or maybe I would only appear on television with a parrot. I had options.

  I’d read once that Lucille Ball was asked by a movie studio to dye her hair red to make her stand out and be more memorable. Obviously it worked; to this day she’s the most famous redhead of all time. Perhaps red hair would make me the most memorable fat girl on the Internet?

  When I arrived home from the Land’s End shoot in New York, I called up Autum, a stylist friend I’d grown up with. It was time to start getting my hair done by a professional again, not standing in my bathroom naked, using plastic gloves while rapping along with Nicki Minaj.

  Immediately discarding the parrot and monocle ideas, Autum and I started talking seriously about dyeing my hair red with the same fervor a head of state exhibits while deciding to invade a country or a TV fan exhibits when they finally decide to drop cable and go with Netflix for good. Andy was on board from the start, though he had very different ideas about what red would look like.

  When I said, “I’m going to dye my hair red,” he saw Christina Hendricks, Jessica Rabbit, and Scarlett Johannson in Black Widow, while I was envisioning Lucy, Anne Shirley, and Angela Chase from My So-Called Life.

  I think I landed somewhere in the middle.

  I don’t want to be overly dramatic here, but dyeing my hair red changed my life. Red hair took me from being just a blogger to being a full-time working woman’s advocate and fashion spokesmodel. I stood out, I was memorable, and more and more people paid attention to what I had to say. Everyone loves a redhead.

  Except for the people who believe they have no souls or want to make magic from their bones.

  So the hair on your head isn’t your only hair. Yeah, I’m going there. I mean, why not be extra thorough? Pubic hair requires upkeep, too.

  My struggles began early.

  Once I hit high school, all my friends were actively trimming themselves, but I couldn’t quite figure out a way to get the job done discreetly. If I shaved, it took close to an hour, causing the hot water to run out before I could rinse all the hair off my legs, the side of the tub, and the bar of soap. I had to secretly throw entire bars of soap away, leaving my dad to get into the shower and scream, “Who the hell keeps eating the soap?”

  Of the various awesome things to come out of the nineties, Nad’s had to be one of the strangest. Nad’s was a product invented by a woman in Australia for her hairy daughters, and there was an hourlong infomercial for it that ran nightly explaining that you simply spread the heatless wax goo on any hair you wanted to remove, gave it a pull, and the hair was gone.

  A jar of it was relatively inexpensive, and one day in an aisle of Walmart, I talked my mom into buying one for me, explaining that I wanted to use it for my upper lip.

  Once I was safely back in my locked bedroom, I spread the green wax across the front of my pubic area, laid a cloth strip across the wax, and pulled. It was horrifyingly painful and not at all effective. I tried scraping it, rinsing it with steaming-hot water, blowing it with a hairdryer on high . . . nothing could get the wax off, and for days it stuck there, causing my underwear to further seal it to my skin, eventually working as a junk drawer collecting lint and loose change.

  It took a week for the Nad’s to become hard enough to start coming off in tiny balls, and I swore I’d never wax again.

  From that point on, I resigned myself to life as a shaver. It was easier, cheaper, and I could do it myself, which is typically how I like to address my vulva outside of an intercourse or baby-coming-outta-it setting. For those things, I’ve found the involvement of others is best.

  Technically, life should have gone along well enough after that. I’d do one big shave, and then do maintenance to keep things manageable. But that never happened, as I was simply too lazy. Every shave was the “big” shave, and I would exit the now freezing-cold forty-minute-long shower covered in chunks of hair like a Sasquatch with tennis elbow.

  Once I got to adulthood, so many of my frie
nds embraced waxing that I became curious, but aside from the earlier bad Nad’s experience, I had new fears. What if my vulva looked weird? What if the professional waxer had to lift my stomach or thighs to get to the hair? What if it smelled odd because I was so nervous I just sweated everywhere? I wasn’t sure I was ready to show my private parts to a woman who was probably much younger than me, and make excuses for how things looked down there. A reality I only recently came face-to-face with, myself.

  I was thirty the first time I really looked at my vagina. I knew it was there, I’d felt it a bunch, others had seen it, three kids had come out of it, so yeah, it’s been around. But I’d never actually gotten a mirror and looked at things myself. Looking down at it is not an option, not with big boobs or a stomach.

  I once tried to use my phone to take a picture of it, but the angle was wrong and I couldn’t find an agreeable filter. I even tried setting my phone on the floor between my legs, squatting down and taking video, but it ended up looking like the Lorax was attempting to give my iPhone CPR.

  I eventually got Andy involved and asked him to really quickly take a flattering picture of my pubic hair, which he did with absolutely no questions asked. Apparently after eleven years of marriage, nothing I say surprises him.

  Things looked okay; normal, really. Nothing was hanging out, bumpy, or discolored. It didn’t look like they do in pornos, because those women have their labia lips removed, but it definitely looked young. Not underage young, but a solid twenty-seven at the most.

  As I moved forward with my decision to wax, I began casually talking to friends who mentioned having had it done, but there’s no classy way to ask, “So hey, did they have to lift your fat up, or was the table inclined so everything just kinda rolled back on its own?”

  Chubby-girl foreskin, it’s a thing.

  Eventually I figured the only way I was going to get all the answers I needed was to just go get waxed. It took me a bit to find someone who did full Brazilian waxes, and not just bikini waxes. The difference being that a Brazilian wax removes all of the hair, and a bikini wax simply removes the sides so that it doesn’t creep out of your bathing-suit bottoms. If I was getting my pubic hair pulled off, I was doing the whole thing.