I've been thinking about appearances lately. Physically appearance, that is. A couple of weeks ago, I changed my hair color from too-too-blond to something closer to my natural color, light brown. One of my former students manages the salon I go to, and I ran into her on the day of my appointment. I complimented her on her new hair color and said, "I like the new length, too." She looked puzzled and said to me, "Oh! You mean my hair extensions. Yeah, I had those removed." Hair extensions?! I had no idea. Then she apologized to me, "I'm sorry my face is so red. I just had a chemical peel yesterday." I guess I'm naive, but when I hear chemical peel, I think medical procedure, so I expressed alarm. "What's wrong?" I asked. "Are you okay?" Again, she gave me that puzzled look. "Everything is fine," she said. "Sometimes you just need to brighten up your complexion."
Really? Exchanges like this one make me feel like I wasn't issued the female handbook at birth or something. Do people really have chemical peels to improve their looks? Apparently so. I guess some chemicals on the face is no more extreme than the chemicals the hairdresser smeared all over my head to change my hair color. I wonder what else women do in the pursuit of beauty that I don't know about. I don't see any peels or hair extensions in my future, but I won't be going grey anytime soon.
One last story on the beauty front. I canceled my lit class last week to go to a conference, so my Thursday class didn't see my new hair color until yesterday. I'd forgotten about it, so I was perplexed by the fact that a couple of them were really scrutinizing me when I walked in. Finally, my student Jeff, a friendly 18 year old, asked me, " did you do something different to your hair?" I explained that I'd changed the color, and one of the women in the room said to Jeff, "Wow! Your girlfriend must love you." He didn't understand, so I explained that lots of women complain that their significant others (or men in general) don't even notice when they make dramatic changes to their hair, and that that makes them feel invisible. His comment to me must have made him seem like some kind of evolved man to the women in the class. "No!" Jeff said emphatically, "I never notice! This is the first time I've ever noticed anybody's hair." I don't know if he got it, but I begged him, " Do not tell your girlfriend about this. You CANNOT tell her that the first time you ever noticed the change in a woman's hairstyle was the day you noticed your 53-year-old professor's hair." No good can come from that.
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