When copied hairstyles backfire

Women and hair are inseparable. Where there are women, there is talk about hair. Many years back, a Cabinet minister carried along her hair dresser to a foreign country for a conference. When there was hue and cry, the then Cabinet minister nonchalantly claimed that she had to look like a minister during the women’s conference.

Irrespective of age, women and hair still remain an emotional affair. Mention weaves and you get the attention of any woman in the vicinity. Last week, I took my seven-year-old daughter to a clinic as she was suffering some fungal infection on her scalp and that’s when I appreciated women’s love affair with their hair. After a close examination, the young doctor, who could possibly be in his late twenties or early thirties prescribed a shampoo and a cream to apply on affected area. But the show stopper or rather the jaw dropping moment was when he issued a very dire indictment. “Unfortunately, she will have to cut her hair for the medicine to take effect”. He said this with the ease you have when you request coffee in a coffee house. The rebellion was immediate.

The small diva shook her head so violently that I feared she could ruin her neck, declaring: “Dad, I am not shaving my hair!” The young doctor’s inexperience in matters family was clearly evident. Even with a referendum in the house, this was a close call. I called the mother, put her on the speaker phone and relayed the young doctor’s indictment. She immediately counter-indicted his verdict and declared she, too, was not going to cut her daughter’s hair. I looked at the doctor in the eye with the ‘I-told-you-so’ look.

He just shrugged; opting to take it like it’s still our problem if we don’t want to cut the little diva’s hair. But I saw it as his problem that he could not fuse fashion and cultural considerations into his medical practice. Perhaps he hasn’t dated for long to understand that hair can make or break a couple’s relationship.

However, some women must also know that hair styles however good looking they seem on other people’s heads is not a one size that fits all. Simply because your best friends hauls around a three kilograms worth of weave and looks like Beyoncé does not mean that if you buy the same weave, the same majestic and magnetic effect will be present. No.

Two cents advice

It all depends on the shape of your head. You cannot wake up in the morning and decide you want to copy the  outgoing Nairobi Woman Representative hair style. No way. It does not work like that. You do not have her physique and therefore you cannot copy her swag. Other women keep their hair short in a nice African way. For some, it comes out so well they look like school girls. But if our shape of the head is not in congruence with the short hair style exemplified by our First Lady, please do not contemplate cutting your hair short.

There are too many women in this town who watch music videos and news anchors and immediately decide to ape with complete disregard of the physique and hair style harmony. In the end you end up looking like those scare crows that are used by farmers in rice plantations to scare away birds from stealing the harvest. My two cents advice to the women is, please stick to the expert advice of your hair dresser, do not jump into the bandwagon of quickly rushing for this or that hair style simple because it appears to be in vogue. The shape of your head has not evolved to the new fashion. So keep your hair style fantasies within the conference and shape of your head.