Straighten up and fly, right?

I am appalled to admit that this morning I spent, nay WASTED a whole hour doing nothing other than straightening my hair. That’s right a whole hour. I took me 60 minutes to get my relatively wavy, not at all curly hair what stylists would call “straight”.

The reason I am so annoyed by this is that even though I knew what a ridiculous waste of time it was, I continued to do it. You’d think that I have better things to do with my time, but no. Let’s see, in the hour it took me to do my hair I could have:

• Walked the dogs and made their day.
• Gotten some work done so the rest of my weekend is free
• Made myself a sandwich (yum) or 4
• Made 30 packs of 2minute noodles (I’m just illustrating a point)
• Caught up with an old friend over coffee
• Updated my blog (although technically then I wouldn’t have had something to write about)

I could go on or ages, I mean the list is really endless…Yet still I decided to spend the hour on myself. No wait, spending time on yourself, like meditating, soul-searching doing yoga and getting massages is good. What I did is spend too much time on my APPEARANCE. Big difference. How did it happen that I (who rarely wears make up and seldom even blow-dry my hair) felt the need to waste precious time on getting my hair done?

And to think there are women (sorry, people) who do this every day? Where on earth do they find the time? They either get up at 5 in the mornings or they have some super-charged turbo straightener that costs the same as a small boat and is only sold in Nepal. Either way, I wish they would stop. They’re making the rest of us normal people, who prefer DOING things rather than GETTING READY to do things look bad.

To be honest, my hair isn’t all that bad when I don’t blow-dry or straighten it. Sure it’s a bit frizzy in the beginning, but everyone’s hair is like that after a wash. Oh it isn’t? Must just be me then. The funny thing is while I was half-way through the process and sporting a serious arm cramp (how am supposed to get to the back anyway?) I actually contemplated just leaving the rest. But I couldn’t. the part I had finished just looked so, well shiny. And pretty. And I figured I’ve gotten this far, I might as well finish. So another few serious arm spasm later I was done and if I do say so myself really happy with the result. Still I couldn’t help feeling guilty for how much time I had wasted, not to mention the damage I just caused my hair. Being “iron” by a scalding hot straightener isn’t exactly my idea of fun. Sorry hair, but you had to be straight. Waves just aren’t cool anymore.

So who exactly was this person who decided that straight hair is so much better than curly hair? I’m pretty sure some marketing director at GHD has been a busy boy, but since I don’t have any evidence I’ll just go head and blame it on society. I can do that, right? It seems like we’ve all become so obsessed with what we look like, we have no problem spending ridiculous amounts of time (and money!) on anything that will make ourselves “look better”. It’s pretty bizarre. But we do it anyway. “All in the name of beauty.”

So straightening my hair has robbed me of 1 hour today, which means I’ll only have 23 hours left to do what I actually want to do. (I shudder to think how short my day would be if I had to add make-up to that equation…) Personally it seems like a bit of a waste and I think in future I’ll leave my hair to be whatever it wants to be and rather spend an hour doing something worthwhile. In fact, maybe it’s time we all had a good long look in the mirror and accept our hair the way it is.

If you ask me, it’s our priorities that could do with some straightening.