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In reply to the discussion: Women with long hair approaching 60? A no-no? [View all]LiberalEsto
(22,845 posts)When I was in high school in the late 1960s, many of us wore our hair in a "flip" style. Since my hair was fine and limp, I slept many nights on metal rollers an inch or more in diameter, which contained spiky plastic brushes inside to keep the hair in place. Ow, the agony! It took a lot of hair spray and Dippity Doo to keep my flip from flopping almost immediately after the rollers came out.
By the time I got to college in 1969, women were using two- or three-inch wide rollers, or even metal juice containers, to make their hair straight. Some of us also ironed our hair. A few young women at college had portable hair dryers that came in a case and had a plastic tube connected to what looked like a plastic shower cap. It had a lot of small holes inside. You put the shower cap on your head over your curlers, switched it on, and the machine blew warm air on your head to set the curls. My family could never afford one of those, but I borrowed one once or twice.
That's what life was like in the days before blow-dryers and electric curling irons. My mother owned a pair of metal curling tongs from the days when my grandmother heated the tongs on a stove and used them to crimp curls on her own hair and my mother's. She said that was torture, since you could easily burn your hair or scalp, and it took a long time.