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Some Woman Called Claire Worthington Moaning About Her Hair

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Archives for 2018

FAREWELL, PARTING IS SUCH SWEET SORROW – SAYING GOODBYE TO YOUR HAIR EXTENSIONS

By Claire Worthington

No matter how happy you were, the day your stylist put them in, eventually you reach a stage where it’s time to remove your hair extensions. If you are one of those well behaved types this will be at the appropriate time, as suggested by your hairdresser. Many of you will have taken a small detour via the delay zone and then there are some of you, whose hair extensions have been there so long that they’ve been taken hostage by your own hair! I’m not going to judge, you know who you are and I’m sure there was a good reason.

When I started writing this post I was in the process of trying to say goodbye to a weave, by that I mean that I kept looking at my hair in the mirror and shaking my head in mild despair. Whilst Barbara my hairdresser was working her magic, I was happily sitting there watching television and chatting away. I had no interest whatsoever in how I was going to get it out again.

Then came the the day I stepped away from the delay zone and decided to remove my weave. When I started that afternoon’s mission it all seemed quite straight forward. My hair was cornrowed and the shop bought hair was stitched to it. All I had to do was remove the stitches. Technically all of that remained true but the straight lines of my imagination were nowhere to be seen, well felt. I faced a maze of hair with occasional stitches. The same stitches and ends of thread that were 100% visible the day before, when I wanted to hide them, were now secret ninjas hiding deftly in the undergrowth. I spotted one and by the time I’d picked up the scissors (or seam ripper from my sewing kit) it’d disappeared again.

There was a time when I didn’t care as much as I do now. I would simply tug my hair and hack away at whatever looked like a piece of thread until I extracted the fake hair, but these days I care about what’s underneath. I finally appreciate my own hair, not enough to stop writing a blog about how it’s ruining my life, but enough to respect my home grown hair and stop butchering it whilst removing shop bought hair.

I’m trapped in a perpetual hair cycle of my own making.

  • Stage One: Sulk about my natural hair
  • Stage Two: Plan new hairdo
  • Stage Three: Book hair appointment and buy copious amounts of shiny new hair
  • Stage Four: Visit my stylist and leave with a fabulous new hairdo
  • Stage Five: Strut about for a couple of weeks like somebody in a L’Oreal advert
  • Stage Six: Notice that my shop bought hair is starting to free style
  • Stage Seven: Enter The Delay Zone 
  • Stage Eight: Fall under the curse of the Double Hair Do
  • Stage Nine: Recognise that I need to leave the delay zone but feel overwhelmed at the size of the task
  • Stage Ten: Finally remove the shop bought hair and have an extended deep conditioning treatment
  • Stage Eleven: Remember what shrinkage is
  • Stage Twelve: Return to Stage One

Sometimes I have a thirteenth stage, where I get over myself and make it past the concept of my shoulder length hair disappearing into a three inch fro and make do with my head grown hair for a while.

Despite my endless obsessing, it’s really not that bad. The only person who thinks I’m any different is me and I know that I’m being an idiot. I’m getting better at reducing my obsessive hair thoughts and being self employed my current lack of regular income means that sometimes I have no choice. Hair extensions and stylists cost money that I don’t always have.

I occasionally get a confused look from people who don’t know me that well and experience two totally different hair styles in the same week, but it’s hardly life changing and most of them recognise that I’m always me, but the hair comes and goes.

Filed Under: Hair Moans Tagged With: bad hair day, hair extensions, suburban afro

IT’S ANOTHER ME – MY SCARY BROWN DOLL

By Claire Worthington

One of my most treasured possessions is a baby doll. By modern standards she’s not the prettiest of dolls, but she means a lot to me because I’ve had her since I was very small.

My doll is made of hard, dark brown plastic, her straight hair is molded into her mainly bald head and for some reason her eyes are orange and they close noisily when you lie her on her back. My children think she’s scary and one in particular regards her as the sort of thing more at home in a horror film than a children’s playroom.

Although my doll is now wearing a pink fluffy romper, that wasn’t her original outfit, she inherited that after three decades or more of being naked. At some point in the gap between playing with dollies  and becoming sentimental and middle aged, her clothes along with lots of my other toys will have been given away. When she arrived on Christmas morning she was wearing a hand knitted orange and white dress with a matching hat. That retro number has long since disappeared and the fact that she had no other clothes, suggests that she probably didn’t come with an outfit.

As a little girl, although she was always there I don’t remember playing with her very much, but I was always very fond of her. I definitely didn’t like her as much as my Tiny Tears. Tiny Tears was the must have toy of 1970 whatever, because she weed herself if you fed her water and squeezed hard enough, which was quite impressive in those days.

So why do I have this weird attachment for her? There are two main reasons.

The first reason is that she’s a connection with my childhood. I’m increasingly fascinated with things that remind me of being a little girl. I have an entire Pinterest board dedicated to things from my childhood including television programmes I watched, Ladybird books, toys I owned, and sweets they no longer make. My doll reminds me of being a little girl and keeping her is a way to remember those days.

The second reason I’m so attached to my doll is because as the only brown doll I owned at the time, she was one of the few toys that actually reflected how I looked. I allegedly exclaimed that she was another me when I received her. All my other dolls were white and usually had blonde hair and although Tiny Tears, Sindy and Barbie were always my favourites, they didn’t look like me. To be honest “Little Claire” with her straight molded hair and orange eyes didn’t either but I knew that she was like me. It was a poor imitation but at least she was supposed to look like me and for whatever reason her hard plastic skin and noisy orange eyeballs never bothered me.

Finding dolls with brown skin is much easier to do now and they are no less attractive than their paler counterparts, although strangely enough they are sometimes referred to as “ethnic”, presumably to avoid the whole “should we call it brown?” question. If you’re buying a doll in 2018 you have a wider set of choices. Large companies are offering a range of different skin tones. Skinny and blonde may still be the default, but at least other options exist. There are also lots of small companies who are creating beautiful dolls in every skin shade.

Showing children that they are unique, but not unusual, is important. The images they see on television and in magazines matters. The characters they read about in books and the physical attributes of the toys they play with matters. My orange eyed scary doll was a part of my childhood and although we didn’t look alike she was and will forever be, another me.

 

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Tagged With: childhood toys, representation

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Created by Claire "WorthyOnTheWeb" Worthington as a development site and an opportunity to complain about her hair.

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