Getting Into the Tao of Hair

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If your hair is very long and very fine you will have hassles with tangles after you wash it. These hassles will increase the longer it gets. Unless you enjoy ripping out your hair in clumps every time you comb (if you still comb it), you might want to try a cream rinse.

All cream rinses—expensive commercial ones or cheap ones you make yourself—do one useful thing and one thing only: They coat the hair with something which keeps the tangles down. Stale beer poured through your hair and rinsed out might work as well for you as the costliest bottle of glop on the shelf. Again, natural plants might be used.

If you really must set your hair, remember that the only difference between the twenty-nine-cent bottle of wave set and the three-buck jar from somebody's "house" is largely in the perfumes. And stale beer works fine, too.

A few words on diseases of the scalp:

White flakes of dandruff are more or less natural; wash your hair more often. Dandruff that is reddish, often accompanied by itchy scal, indicates that your head has something growing there besides hair. See a doctor.

If you're a woman and your hair is falling out, see a doctor: Something is wrong.

If you're a man and your hair is falling out, take a look in the mirror. If it's going at either side of your forehead and/ or the top of your head in the back, chances are you've got male pattern baldness about which you can do the following: (1) Get a wig; (2) Get hair transplants at the cost of several thousand dollars; (3) Take female hormones which, besides causing your hair to come in vigorously again, will aid you if you intend to enter the transvestites' Miss America contest; or (4) Realize that you're a male who's getting older and get behind and groove on the natural phenomena. If your hair is going in irregular patterns, there's something wrong: See a doctor.

Now to cutting:

In a sense the simplest, most natural and easiest thing to do about your hair is, nothing. Wash it when you take a shower, massage your scalp with your finger tips (not nails!) to increase the blood circulation down where the hair is still alive and, beyond that, let it alone. If this is your bag (for a year and a half it's been mine), you can stop reading. Go in peace. Stay out of Mississippi.

If, however, you'd like to get into cutting your own or your friends' hair (unless you've got hair which grows naturally into an afro, you will find cutting your own maddeningly difficult), you will need two pairs of scissors: One that looks like "A" for blunt cutting and one that looks like "B" for thinning. If you pay more than six bucks for either pair, you've been taken. Four is a good price at a discount house that specializes in hair products.

You will also need a comb. Any comb that is long. That's all. The "trimcomb" that was given a paragraph in the most recent Whole Earth Catalogue is no general solution to haircutting problems. If you don't know what you're doing, you can take off huge clumps of hair with it before you get it under control. It's useful for blending a finished haircut, but for little else.

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