have a very complicated relationship with my hair. It went from thick and wavy to Electric Shock Tina Turner in the course of one year when I was about 9 years old. My hair changes almost daily but for most of my (very early) youth it looked something like this.
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 Please excuse the weirdness of this photo. That’s my mate Jimmy and I have no idea what we’re doing but he is wearing a Care Bears back pack… is it a clue???Â
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Basically I had the world’s most giant hair. My hair is still on the larger side but this is what it looked like at the height of its power. I couldn’t use regular hair elastics because they would snap when I wrapped them around my ponytail. I had to use home-made giant hair bands made out of waist band sewing elastic to tie my hair back for school. Trendy right? Once I washed it and 2 pen lids fell out of it and I have no idea how long they’d been in there. Our pet budgie once got stuck in there too and my mum had to cut him out with manicure scissors. Poor mum used to have to wash it for me in the bath until I was about 12 years old because I didn’t have the arm strength to do it myself. She understandably got really tired of spending 2 hours brushing dead animals out of my hair every week, so when I was about 13 she made a very bad hair decision on my behalf.
My hairdresser had heard about this thing called ‘channelling’ that was supposed to thin out curly hair to make it less boofy. This basically meant cutting very thin channels of hair horizontally across my head, really close to my scalp and underneath the top layer of my hair to hide it. It worked brilliantly… on the first day I got it done. Then it started to grow out almost immediately and little fuzzy tufts of hair started sticking out everywhere. Curly hair takes FOREVER to grow because it forms in spirals which really slows the process down. It probably took about 8 years before I could tie my hair up without little tendrils of frizz popping free every couple of seconds. I used so much hair spray growing that disaster out, I’m sure I’m personally responsible for destroying the ozone layer.
Lesson? Never let your mother make hair decisions for you when she’s just spent 3 hours trying to comb a giant glob of toothpaste out of your woolly mammoth mane.
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Tell me… what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done to your hair?
Feel free to share a picture… I could do with a giggle today!
PS. Here’s what happens when I straighten my hair… it ain’t pretty.
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38 Comments
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Back in the olden days, 1993, I got the very trendy spiral perm. My weird wavy hair took to it so well that it embraced the curl tightly like in your pic up there. I quite loved it at the time, but looking back at photos- I had a fringe, a tightly curled one, and I was trying to style it in my normal wavy hair way. Not cool. Also I wore a velvet choker – another tragic story for another day!
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That sounds amazing. I can’t imagine someone purposefully trying to make their hair look like that. Oh and we ALL had velvet chokers. 🙂
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LOL! You crack me up Smags. My worst hair was a blunt bob and fringe. My hair had just started to curl and was 99% frizz. I didn’t own a hairdryer and that short fringe took FOREVER to grow out. Super awkward.
I did manage to find a bob that suits curls – a graduated layered bob. One of my fave haircuts of all time.-
I should consider that! I’m actually in the process of growing my hair longish again… I think messy voluminous up-do is the key for this shocker of a hair cycle I’m in at the moment.
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Nope. You win!
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I know right? Luckily curly hair hides lots of major mistakes.
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Two things. When I was 10 I thought it was cool to hair gel my fringe into a hard block, side swept. Yeah, lovely. Next thing was about 3 years ago when I decided I wanted a warmer (think cinnamon) tinge to my mousey brown hair. Asked hairdresser for ‘brunette with a warm undertone’ – walked out with a purple-red reminiscent of Home and Away’s Irene circa 1999. Not a good look for me!
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Oh no! Purple isn’t warm! Yuck!
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When I was 16 I went on holiday to Spain with some mates. One night my hair didn’t go right so I cut it to style with my nail scissors. It worked a treat, or so I thought, so I did it the next night, and the next night and the night after that. By the time I arrived home, I had a proper mullet, with long hair at the back, a big tufty bit on the top and no sides. It took ages to grow out and as a result there were a lot of bad hair days. I learnt the “never cut your own hair” lesson the hard way!
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Oh my god, we’ve all made that mistake. I still do it occasionally!
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Ok in year seven I begged and begged and BEGGED my mother to get my hair permed. Finally, I was allowed!
You know how it looked? Fucking fantastic is how it looked. I got voted the prettiest girl in year seven. THEY HELD A POLL AND I WON. My mother, unfortunately, could not stand my perm. I loved my perm. My mother hated my perm. My mother took me to the hairdressers in Penrith and told them to cut it all off. I was almost crying. The hairdresser felt so bad, looked at me and said “Are you sure this is what you want?” I wasn’t allowed to speak. My mother barked JUST CUT IT OFF.
Boy short. Awful, awful short. It was year seven. I was disbanded from the popular group – true story. My hair looked so bad that even the kids who got bullied would bully me. It took years to grow out and to this day, I will never get my hair cut short again. EVER.
Welcome to my childhood Smags don’t stay too long it burns xxxxxxx
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Oh my god that story is horrible! What the actual fuck? Dude. Get a perm. You own it to baby Eden!
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I had dead straight hair up until I had kids, and one of my best mates had gorgeous big loopy curls. We were so jealous of each others hair :o)
My hair disaster ended up being one of the best things to happen to my head, but at the time it was devastating. Mum volunteered me for hair modelling when I was 14-15, just before one of our Proms.
Basically it was so she didn’t have to pay for a haircut for me….
I went from longish, light brown / blonde hair, past my brastrap on my back, to a bright red pixie cut. OMFG.
It was such a massive change for one day, and without any consultation with me.
I had to have professional photos taken straight after the hair cut, so I had to not cry or snot up in general.
Dad picked me up afterwards and I cried all the way home. I hated on that fkn hairdresser so hard.
Once I had the chance to dye it dark brown (so my head didn’t glow in the dark) & learnt how to style it, I eventually grew to love it.
But no way was I trusting anyone else to make hair decisions for me ever again…..-
Parents are just mean about hair aren’t they? I have that disgusting 80s mullet that we all had when were kids. What were our parents thinking???
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oh my worst worst effort (and there have been a few shockers !!) was trying to make my hair look like the lead singer of eighties two hit wonder ‘Berlin’. She had a dead straight platinum blonde long bob, the bottom half of which was dyed jet black. Hmmm… my hair is wavy and light brown – we had no straighteners then. What was I thinking ?? Fail.
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Plebs like us should be allowed to try to emulate famous people’s hair styles. They have money and time that we don’t – it’s always a bad idea!
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My sister and I once gave each other haircuts by cutting chunks out of our tightly french braided hair….We buried the evidence in the sandpit. I think I was genuinely surprised that mum knew what we’d done.
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Ha! You Blake girls have seriously thick hair though – I’d be shocked if your mum noticed a few snips out of hair like that!
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Oh gosh, back in the 80’s i got the good old spiral perm! What was i thinking!!! I look back at photos and shake my head!
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Oh everyone did the perm back then! I grew up with everyone saying ‘People pay a lot of money to have their permed to look like yours!’ and I was like ‘Whhhhyyyyyy????’
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I had very a very short bob when I was about 9 that looked like floppy Hugh Grant mid 90s hair… Devastating. I also packet dyed my hair as a young teen and ended up with a hideous shade of copper splotched around my head. You live and learn…
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Whoa totally! I’ve done that too… bright red hair in my late teens. Shudder.
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The worst thing I’ve ever done to my hair is getting it straight chemically after I left high school. My hair is naturally wavy but since I believe that pin-straight hair is beautiful and I think it’s a lot easier to style straight hair, I was completely wrong after I straighten my hair. Not only my hair looks so flat and it looks like I’m experiencing hair loss (my hair is naturally thin I guess) but it requires time and money to maintain the straightness.
Now, I no longer care about getting pin-straight hair because I always love the kind of waviness I used to have and the waviness is something similar to what I’ve seen in Japanese fashion magazine. Maybe I should go and book an appointment with a hairstylist to get a hairstyle that suits my hair and my lifestyle *sigh*
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Ah! The grass is always greener right? I’ve never been tempted to chemically straighten… I just know I would regret it.
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Oh man, I’ve been experimenting with my hair for like 15 years now. I’ve had some bad ones. The one that springs to mind though, would have been one of the most recent, and that was late 2011! I had just had my heart broken and I wanted something new. I have ALWAYS loved curly hair, so I went into the hair dressers with a picture of YOU, and your hair! Yep. I did that. She said, no problems, and I spent a few hours, a few hundred dollars getting a colour and perm, I wanted it a red colour and a wispy fringe. This is how it turned out –
http://extralargeaslife.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/blah.png
http://extralargeaslife.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/blah2.png
http://extralargeaslife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/hair001.jpgThe colour faded within a few washes, and I just hated it! It wasn’t curly, it was just frizz! Sigh. I will never get a perm again!
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Oh my god no way! That’s awesome! Mine was the same – it faded after a few washes and made my hair go all limp and sad so I’m back to dark brown. Sometimes you just need to listen to what your hair wants!
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I had the old spiral perm also, but probably the worst thing I’ve done was get only my fringe permed when I was twelve. Looked terrible! (I thought it was good back then.)
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What was WITH all the curly fringes back then? Who decided it was cool?
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Hahaha, I dunno. But it sounds so ridiculous now!
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I have a hair story that still gets doled out at parties.
In my second year of university I had bright pink hair that was down to my shoulders. It was rad. But due to the constant bleaching most of my natural wave had disappeared and it was pin straight all the time. I decided to try and inject some curl by perming it. My friend who did it told me about sixteen times that it was a bad idea. I assured her that I was aware how stupid it was but we were doing it anyways.
The perm made my hair turn to jelly. Like it actually felt like a jellyfish. It was awesome in a horrifying kind of way. And we did this on a Friday night, so the hairdressers weren’t open until Monday. I ended up having to get my hair cut so it was 10cm long. A nice short, bright pink, fluffy buzzcut. I was also quite overweight at the time so it looked even more spectacular.
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I can’t even imagine what that must of felt like. Jelly hair? I want to touch it! Great story – you might be pretty close to winning!
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I had all my hair cut off when I was nine in a Princess Di cut. OMG. I got so bullied about it at school because it was a fuzz ball. For some reason I was not allowed to grow my hair until I left home and now I have long, beautiful hair that is straight.
I hated my hair so much that once I attacked it with Dad’s razor and had bald patches. Horrible.-
That’s so weird isn’t it? My mum wouldn’t let me dye my own hair at home but that was because it made a mess. I remember by brother’s ex-girlfriend dying her hair in our bathroom and I totally dobbed on her. I was appalled. We just didn’t do home dyes at my house. Nuh uh.
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I would say dreadlocks, but truthfully, even then, I regret nothing.
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I’ve actually considered dreads myself for a while but I’ve never got the nerve up… I blame Orphan Black for my sudden obsession! 🙂
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My heart goes out to 13yo you! Oh the things we do…
I tried to once dye the bottom half of my black hair blonde… in a public toilet…. at the mall with tinfoil and bleach. Half my hair fell out and the rest turned this lovely lovely highlighter orange colour..
My friend’s kinda turned out alright so I was super peeved.
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Oh my god! In a public toilet??? Why would you do that? My lord I love stories like this… It makes you think that parents should never leave teenagers unsupervised!
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The problem with living in Japan years ago (I was there for work) was being surrounded by Japanese ladies with gorgeous locks of curly hair. Now my hair is dry, coarse and very thick and while curly hair may look good on many with that hair description, it doesn’t for me.
So when I was back home, I decided I too must have that gorgeous curly hair and had my hair permed. It looked absolutely dreadful, I hated it so much and had it straightened one week after that. You could pretty much imagine how fried my hair was. Never, ever again!
