Thursday, October 21, 2010

Hair: Natural or Not?

I'm not talking the musical from the sixties. (But did you know its full title is Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical? I didn't!) I'm talking hair enhancement, so if you love to colour or otherwise enhance your hair, you might want to skip this moodling. Really.

My beautiful sixteen year old daughter came home from a friend's house with her lovely brown hair a fresh auburn colour two weeks ago. It's not the first time she's coloured her hair. Two years ago, she went for pink highlights, and she was auburn this spring, but it grew out. The colour looks wonderful on her, actually. I do like it. But something is really messed up when gorgeous teenage girls think that their hair is boring and they need to do something to change it.

I'll be the first to admit it -- I have coloured my hair in the past. My sisters and I had an evening with a box from Clairol not long after my third daughter was born. My hair was already greying at that point, so we picked up a rich brown (the ingredients of which I never thought to question) of non-permanent colour and, voila, a new me. Every time I washed my hair that week, I watched colour run down the drain. Years later, when my sister-in-law and I turned forty within two weeks of each other, we went to a snazzy salon and spent an outrageous amount of money on permanent colour -- with highlights. My hair never felt so soft or looked so fantastic.

So why do I have issues with the hair colour industry? Well, for the same reason that I have issues with anything that complicates life, like the cosmetics/beauty/fashion industries. They have a way of manipulating us so that we think we need to change just for the sake of change (and for the sake of their bottom line, but they don't mention that).  If I had the time, I could tear into just about every cosmetic craze, fashion fad or beauty boon that is recommended, but today I'm choosing hair dye. When a larger portion of the world's women every day are subjecting themselves to unpronounceable chemicals (ever try to read the side of a hair colour box?) in order to spice up their lives by spiffing up their locks, it can't be good.

I wish you could meet my dear neighbour, back alley Mary. She was a funny and delightful woman that I just loved to talk with whenever I saw her. We chatted about everything and anything over our respective fences, shared gardening tips, and she taught me to make pickles, perogies and pie crusts. She was like an extra grandma to my youngest daughter, and overpaid my kids for shovelling her sidewalks. We all loved her. You'd be hard pressed to find a better neighbour or friend.

Several times during all those over-the-fence chats, Mary commented on my salt-and-pepper hair and how lovely the grey looked. I thanked her, and commented that if she would go natural she'd be even lovelier than she already was. She'd pull at her dye- and perm-frizzed hair, saying, "Oh, I could never do that. My hair is already white -- see the roots? I'd look so old." And I'd look at her outrageous strawberry blonde or brassy brown with those white roots showing through and think, "Who has done this to you? Who has made you think that white hair isn't beautiful on a 74-year-old?"

We know darn well who has done it. Who can't name several hair dye brands without even thinking about it? We've all seen commercials featuring stunningly beautiful women with incredibly shiny (read: shellacked) coloured tresses flowing around them like cascades of riches. I have yet to meet a real human being with hair that looks like that, and I have yet to see an advertisment with a model who has unevenly greying hair like my friend Charleen's, or like mine. (I don't get the Grey Power magazine -- yet.)

According to Marie Claire Magazine (I looked up "International Hair Colour Trends" and found an undated article on the magazine website), in 2008, 1.6 billion dollars were spent on home hair colour in the US, $490 million in Mexico, $180 million in India, and $400 million in the UK (I guess Canada doesn't register on Marie Claire's radar). Increases in sales of in-home hair colorants from between 29% in the Middle East to almost 180% in the Eastern Bloc countries were reported since 2002.

Not a word in the article about chemicals in hair colour, but this week the David Suzuki Foundation (right sidebar under my Favourite Links) released a report on the toxic substances in our personal care products -- wanna bet there are more than a few in those dyes? Anyway... let's guesstimate... let's just pretend that out of 33 million Canadians, a fifth of us (I'll bet that's a good guess) buy six twelve dollar packages of home hair colour per year (gotta keep up with those roots, right?) to the tune of $72 dollars a year. That would mean Canadians spend about $475 million on do-it-yourself dye jobs. Add it with those other figures in the previous paragraph from 2008, and we're up to over three billion dollars spent on colour-in-a-box (and that doesn't include Europe, Australia, Africa, or Asia). Divide by $12, and we're talking two hundred and fifty million home hair colour jobs and all the chemicals they entail. And if every person uses a modest twenty litres of water to wash the chemicals away... that's five billion litres of polluted water. When you take into account the fact that the average person needs five litres of clean water per day to live in a moderate climate, and you realize that 1.2 billion people in the developing world don't have access to clean water (data from  http://www.worldwater.org/ ), it doesn't take a genius to see that all the good water we waste colouring our hair could go a long way...

If you want to argue with my guesstimation or my math skills, be my guest. I never was very good at either. But water issues are becoming critical in a lot of places in our world due to climate change, and needless use of chemicals contributes to the pollution of land, air, oceans, and us. Do we need to dye our hair? Do we have to buy personal care/beauty products that contain toxins? Must we get rid of the clothes in our closets when they're no longer in style? Or is there any way, any way at all we can live more simply?

I moodle today in memory of my friend Mary. I love seeing peoples' true colours, and I never got to see hers before she died of cancer last summer.

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