How to Hide Your Grief in a French Roll

This is Focus Group Archives, a column by Katiy Heath on navigating womanhood and identity within the beauty industry's white corporate gaze.

Don’t look in here, she tells me, saying four words every moderator hopes to hear inside a respondent’s home. This is the moment when a shower curtain is the only thing between me and what she does not want me to see. But like a child told not to look directly into the sun, my looking is inevitable when conducting market research in a “consumer’s natural habitat.”

I inch closer as she pulls back the vinyl sheet, repeatedly telling me not to look, while simultaneously showing me her drain, then the corners of the tub, and then the lining of the trash can. She grabs a hairbrush and lifts it above her head, like an injured bird displaying its wing, for the clients in the hallway who can’t fit in the bathroom. Look at all this shedding, and after the year she’s had. After all she has lost, now her hair.

I suggest that shedding means a change is coming, but she doesn’t see it this way: Most days she doesn’t leave her apartment. Unopened diaper boxes and swaddle blankets are stacked outside of an empty nursery. This wasn’t the change she was planning for.

It is not uncommon for hair loss to occur in mourning. Grief can be as physical as it is emotional, as bereavement-based trauma can trigger a hormone imbalance that disrupts the growth cycle. But, though the thinning of hair is more socially acceptable for a man, a woman who is losing her hair is seen as chronically ill, the integrity of her health viewed as compromised. The respondent knows this part. The clients also know this, which is why we’re here. These interviews will inform the launch of a minoxidil-infused product that treats temporary hair loss for women.

What are we left with when we can no longer hide in our hair?

The beauty industry is responsible for creating this contradictory and impossible standard for women and their hair: Selena Gomez tells us that “strong is beautiful” in a series of ads that credit Pantene for showing her that she can “always take the heat”; Garnier Fructis introduces the Grow Strong Collection, because “as if you’d settle for less.” Images of the luscious and the teased, the tousled and the weaved fill up Instagram frames, featuring faces in masks and captions declaring these tough times won’t last, but tough people like you do, #thickhairdontcare.

The narrative is simple: Hair is a symbol of a woman’s strength. You can scrub your way to clear skin, but a full head of hair is much more difficult to achieve, let alone keep. Good hair takes stamina, resilience. Hair is everything—it can prop us up, hide our vulnerabilities, and propel our confidence to new heights. When our hair begins to fall, what are we really losing? What are we left with when we can no longer hide in our hair?

*

I can’t recall a time when my hand was in my mom’s, or how it is to be wrapped in her arms—we were not a huggy family—but I can tell you what her hair feels like in my fingers. Wavy wheat-blonde strands so soft, so long she could sit on them if they weren’t being laced together by her daughter. Learning to braid, I often tried to emulate the same perfect plaits she was capable of making in my hair, twisting it down my back in one effortless motion. She could turn anyone runway ready using only a round brush and a blow dryer.

My mom went to beauty school in the late ’70s as second-wave feminism gained momentum and longer, more free-flowing hairstyles became fashion. Women were reflecting on the structures of inequality in their personal lives: Activists like Kathleen Cleaver demonstrated the beauty of natural hair and the influence Black women had on white women at that time by rejecting white-centered beauty ideals as a way of rejecting systems of oppression; the rock-musical Hair was written in protest of the Vietnam War, showing peace as a mindset and nonconformity as an alternate path. Everyone’s locks were making a statement: The bigger the hair, the louder the voice.

Corporations were quick to co-opt the power of hair: “Natural is beautiful” was translated into a tagline that companies began bottling up and selling back to consumers for their own capital gain. If anyone was going to make money off of non-white and female liberation, it was going to be big brands, and the white men calling the shots at the top.

Mom—nineteen years old at this time—was also establishing her independence by moving out of my grandparent’s house and supporting herself as a working beautician. She watched icons like Debbie Allen, Iman Abdulmajid, Kelly LeBrock, and Farrah Fawcett in shampoo commercials reinforce the idea that hair—when taken care of—can be your biggest tool of empowerment. Maintaining an abundance of hair meant you were free and flourishing.

Gaining control over her own unruly hair whorls was not easy, but even in the pre-straightener era, she was able to manipulate her dense waves. When it came time, she helped me with mine.

We communicated most through our hair. Before school dances, I would spend hours in the kitchen with the black cape on, as she combed and trimmed my ends. When the other eighth-grade girls gave me the nickname “Poodle,” she had a serum to tamp my frizz; when I told her how badly I had wished for stick-straight, thin wisps, she grabbed the mousse and gave me a voluminous blowout, telling me how much I would appreciate what I had when I was older.

It was easier to discuss our appearances than to consider what really was going on. When she had her thyroid removed my sophomore year, instead of confessing her fears before surgery, she talked about how bothersome the scar would look on her neckline. And when the time came years later, I talked about the bloating of my stomach instead of my worry that endometriosis would keep me from conceiving.

All that mattered, we told ourselves, was what we saw when we looked in the mirror, what we saw when we looked at each other.

*

Today, when I ask respondents about hair icons, Farrah Fawcett inevitably comes up. Even decades after she invented the pin-up industry with her famous red-swimsuit poster and rose to popularity as a perky, crime-fighting detective in the television hit Charlie’s Angels, her feathery hairstyle resonates and remains in the cultural beauty zeitgeist.

Many people don’t know that Farrah Fawcett was also a lifelong visual artist, specializing in drawing, painting, and sculpting—that she was an art major at the University of Texas at Austin who moved out to Los Angeles to pursue acting. Despite not graduating, she kept a consistent practice in her art studio on the property of her LA home and maintained collaborative ties with her mentor Charles Umlauf, who influenced her work until the very end. After her passing in 2009, Fawcett’s estate donated her collection to the Blanton Museum of Art, which features twenty of Umlauf’s works, several of Andy Warhol’s, and more than one hundred pieces of her own.

In an early self-portrait on a white canvas, we see Farrah looking directly at her audience, her eyes open in an occupied stare. Her face is small and off-center, outlined by an all-consuming mane of hair that fades into the background, so it looks like her face is floating inside this follicle cloud. This hair cloud appears infinite, the perfect hiding place for a rainbird to take shelter and wait for the storm to pass. In this portrait, Farrah’s lips are closed, letting her hair do the talking.

For many years, all the public saw of Farrah was her billowing blonde waves. In fact, much of her early commercial success was built on shampoo. She starred in spots for Head & Shoulders (“Hates your dandruff, loves your hair”), Wella Balsam (“Farrah loves Wella, you will too!”), and a co-branded Cougar and Wella “Love Your Hair” sweepstakes for a chance to win a car to match your locks (“Please check only the color which is closest to your own when entering”).

As she became a household name, soon so did her very own shampoo and conditioner line: Farrah Fawcett Hair Care by Fabergé, a line discontinued in the ’80s.

As someone who makes her living based on being a perceived beauty expert and brand historian, I bought a twelve-ounce bottle of her signature cream rinse off eBay so I could try it.

Standing under the water, I unscrew the cap and fill my palm with a balm that hasn’t been on the market for more than three decades.

The balm is a peachy pink, the same shade as the tiles in my grandma’s bathroom. One smell of its perfumed scent and I am back in her house and that room color-blocked in pink—the tiles, the towelettes, the tub—trying on all the department store sprays lined along the sink. Everything bright and fragrant.

I let it coat my hair and sit for a full minute as the bottle suggests, and as I wait I read the back of the pack. There is a quote from Farrah: “I love my hair to look fresh and wholesome and free—like it didn’t have a care in the world.”

Like her hair didn’t have a care in the world. Those carefree feathered locks are what Farrah hid under and relied on to lift her up above the pressure, the stress, the tinted off-camera reality.

*

When my mom started shedding I was home visiting my parents. My grandma was in the hospital with only days left with us, and I hadn’t been back since my separation, so things felt a little off. I was learning how to be alone, and my mom was learning how to mourn someone while she was still here.

That week all we did was sit around looking at the television, the coffee table, the carpet, occasionally a cold plate, before my mom and I would each retreat to our favorite places in the house to cry.

Hers was the bedroom, and mine the bath.

As the faucet ran loud with Mom just two doors down the hallway, I noticed handfuls of blonde along the lines of white caulk, a pale nest hidden in the garbage. I knew I shouldn’t be looking in there—her trash deserved privacy—but I couldn’t help it. Stress was trying to show itself in her hair. I was surrounded by strands of my mom’s grief.

Unbeknownst to me, this wasn’t the first time grief had manifested this way in her body: The first time she experienced shedding was the week leading up to my wedding—the same week Mom had to move Grandma into an assisted-living community and say goodbye to her childhood home, the same week she suppressed her maternal instinct knowing I was too young to walk down the aisle. That same week, with bobby pins and hairspray, she folded her grief into a textbook-perfect French roll she wore with her mother-of-the-bride gown. My mom always hid her grief well.

I didn’t realize how much her hair was hiding until it started to fall. When I noticed the clumps in the shower, I entered a new kind of dialogue. I said things like I am lonely and I miss him. And instead of being met with I am here or This will pass or I am hurting too, there was only silence and, at times, a swift change of topic. This way of communicating—with explicit words and feelings instead of only hair movements and upright postures—was out of our comfort zone.

In the Midwest, we are often most particular in how we don’t talk about things. There are limits on our ability to be uncomfortable or, worse, vulnerable, even with those we love. There is no language for talking about the two major D’s of grief: death and divorce.

Certain types of change happen when no one is looking, like a caterpillar into a butterfly or a leatherback laying its eggs on the beach before dawn. Grief, though. Grief demands an audience. Someone to observe and acknowledge the pain another is forced to move through. Grief refuses to remain hidden; grief will not be ignored.

One way or another, grief will find its way out.

*

Of all the images of Farrah I have come across—her on the cover of the conditioner bottle in my shower, her red-swimsuit poster, three seasons of crime-fighting angels, nearly four decades of actress and modeling footage—the image I am most drawn to is a photograph of her in a studio in Austin.

All that mattered, we told ourselves, was what we saw when we looked in the mirror.

The photograph was taken in 1971 and shows the side profile of Fawcett as a young artist in her early twenties. Chisel in hand, her eyes are concentrated on a mound of clay that has been sculpted into a nude torso. In the background is Farrah’s mentor, Charles Umlauf, working clay with his hands in the shape of Farrah’s head. Contained in this one shot, we get the juxtaposition of Fawcett: Farrah as artist, Farrah as muse.

Even more interesting is Farrah’s hair and what it isn’t doing in this photograph. The feathery tresses that would lift her into the stratosphere of fame and crystalize her image are not the focal point. They are pinned back in a bun hidden from view.

As time went on, details of her private life became public: reports of a controlling husband in the ’70s, records of physical abuse from partners in the ’80s, then the late ’90s. With each decade, even as she took on more challenging dramatic roles (often playing victims of domestic violence like in The Burning Bed and Extremities), her hair never changed, like an impenetrable barrier between her inner and outer worlds.

In 1997, a different Farrah emerged at age fifty, in a special for Playboy. The seventy-two-minute film All of Me includes footage of Fawcett painting and sculpting with her body, with biopic material interspersed throughout. Her hair is short, in a pixie-style fringe when she addresses the camera directly, and wigs are worn during her artistic performance.

In March of this same year, three months prior to the film’s release, she ended her eighteen-year relationship with Ryan O’Neal.

At one point in between takes, Fawcett is on the phone fighting back tears. We hear her telling the person on the other line how she doesn’t like her body, doesn’t like the way her hair looks. The next scene we see Farrah nude, covered in gold paint, her hair like a paintbrush moving across the floor canvas to make the classic strokes—blending, mixing, smudging—wielded like an instrument of expressionism.

The camera cuts away and Farrah is fresh-faced with her iconic feathery layers cascading down. She is holding a pair of silver shears and begins cutting. The soft-spoken Farrah voice is overlaid with the footage: “People say you’ve changed.” Chunks of blonde fall out of frame. “I say yes! Yes! All of me gets better.” She goes on to say that this is more her than Charlie’s Angels, than a lot of other things. The thing that everyone loved—her beauty, her hair—that once consumed her, was no longer needed.

*

I am driving north of Brooklyn; my heart is racing. Maybe it was a song playing in the car, or my subconscious knowing we were approaching the anniversary of our shared loss. Sometimes it takes the mind a moment to catch up to our bodies.

Tear ducts open, and drops flow down my chin, into my hair, signaling I need to exit the highway.

I pull into a gas station parking lot and impulsively call Mom.

The sun casts across the dust on my dashboard—it’s one of those days when it should be warmer than it is.

Out of my periphery I see a car park to my left. Don’t look in here; please don’t look in here.

Between Mom and me, neither of us know what to say.

We aren’t talking, but I hear her still on the line.

Like birds, maybe she and I are meant to communicate in a more sensory way.

If this is how my body remembers this anniversary, then maybe next year it will reflect on this phone call, a memory of remembering.

She breaks the silence: If I could hug you through the phone, I would.

I feel the passenger in the car next-door looking, but I keep my eyes forward and, on the motes, floating in the light.

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