I Feel Bad About My Neck Read Online Free PDF

cheaper by far than psychoanalysis, and much more uplifting. What’s more, it takes much less time than washing and drying your own hair every single day, especially if, like me, you live in a large city where a good and reasonably priced hairdresser is just around the corner. Still, at the end of the year, I’ve spent at least eighty hours just keeping my hair clean and pressed. That’s two workweeks. There’s no telling what I could be doing with all that time. I could be on eBay, for instance, buying something that will turn out to be worth much less than I bid for it. I could be reading good books. Of course, I could be reading good books while having my hair done—but I don’t. I always mean to. I always take one with me when I go to the salon. But instead I end up reading the fashion magazines that are lying around, and I mostly concentrate on articles about cosmetic and surgical procedures. Once I picked up a copy of Vogue while having my hair done, and it cost me twenty thousand dollars. But you should see my teeth.
    Hair Dye
    Many years ago, when Gloria Steinem turned forty, someone complimented her on how remarkably young she looked, and she replied, “This is what forty looks like.” It was a great line, and I wish I’d said it. “This is what forty looks like” led, inevitably, to its most significant corollary, “Forty is the new thirty,” which led to many other corollaries: “Fifty is the new forty,” “Sixty is the new fifty,” and even “Restaurants are the new theater,” “Focaccia is the new quiche,” et cetera.
    Anyway, here’s the point: There’s a reason why forty, fifty, and sixty don’t look the way they used to, and it’s not because of feminism, or better living through exercise. It’s because of hair dye. In the 1950s only 7 percent of American women dyed their hair; today there are parts of Manhattan and Los Angeles where there are no gray-haired women at all. (Once, some years ago, I went to Le Cirque, a well-known New York restaurant, to a lunch in honor of a woman named Jean Harris, who had just that week been released from twelve years in prison for murdering her diet-doctor boyfriend, and she was the only woman in the restaurant with gray hair.)
    Hair dye has changed everything, but it almost never gets the credit. It’s the most powerful weapon older women have against the youth culture, and because it actually succeeds at stopping the clock (at least where your hair color is concerned), it makes women open to far more drastic procedures (like face-lifts). I can make a case that it’s at least partly responsible for the number of women entering (and managing to stay in) the job market in middle and late middle age, as well as for all sorts of fashion trends. For example, it’s one of the reasons women don’t wear hats anymore, and it’s entirely the reason that everyone I know has a closet full of black clothes. Think about it. Fifty years ago, women of a certain age almost never wore black. Black was for widows, specifically for Italian war widows, and even Gloria Steinem might concede that the average Italian war widow made you believe that sixty was the new seventy-five. If you have gray hair, black makes you look not just older but sadder. But black looks great on older women with dark hair—so great, in fact, that even younger women with dark hair now wear black. Even blondes wear black. Even women in L.A. wear black. Most everyone wears black—except for anchorwomen, United States senators, and residents of Texas, and I feel really bad for them. I mean, black makes your life so much simpler. Everything matches black, especially black.
    But back to hair dye. I began having my hair dyed about fifteen years ago, and for many years, I was categorized by my colorist as a single-process customer—whatever was being done to me (which I honestly have no idea how to describe) did not involve peroxide and therefore took “only” ninety minutes every six weeks or