¡Cambio Su Estilo con Mirta!

¡Cambio Su Estilo!

As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, my grandma is a bit of a beauty diva.  Her hairdresser use to have a shop in her neighborhood, walking distance from her house.   So Mama Maria would head to the shop faithfully, every Saturday and get her hair done.  Now that I am here and have access to a car, I told her that I would be willing to take her more often than she currently goes.  So, yesterday we went to ¡Cambio Su Estilo con Mirta!  (Change Your Style with Mirta!).  She wanted to get her hair washed and hmm how do I describe the doo  she got…uh I guess she wanted to get it washed and fluffed lol.  You know, the older woman do, where there’s lots of spray involved and it looks kinda bit bird nesty.  So anyway, I also needed my hair dyed and my eyebrows done since I wasn’t able to make it to the shop before I left New York.  Now, anyone who knows me knows I am very particular about my hair and my eyebrows…especially my eyebrows.  I decided to take the plunge and allow a stranger to touch both because I reasoned to myself the following:

- This woman has been Mama’s hairdresser for over 20 years, she must know what she’s doing.

- Ok, I’ll let them blow my hair out because it seems they won’t know what to do with themselves if I ask them to keep it curly.  That seems to be unheard of in Puerto Rico (ironic, I know, but we’ll get into that later).

- They’re just eyebrows.  Who knows, maybe she’ll surprise me and really do them nice!  If she doesn’t they’ll grow back and I’ll never go to her again.

The results:

- It took two women, a can of hairspray, a blower and a flat iron to get my hair semi-straight and semi-smooth.  Yes, I said SEMI.  The woman was literally spraying a section of my hair with hairspray (which I didn’t find out until today or else I would have stopped her right away) and then putting a flat iron to it!  My poor hair went through so much torture yesterday…a moment of silence for it please.

-My eyebrows?  Yeah, well uh one of my eyebrows is half the size of the other.  Neither is arched or arco as I specifically requested.  What’s worse is after she did them she made sure to say “Your eyebrows look better this way, you don’t need an arch.” She had to recognize the look of absolute horror on my face as I looked in the mirror.   I cannot speak on this subject any further as I am fighting the feeling of complete and utter failure for even thinking it was ok to let someone who uses a waxing wand the size of  a nile file near my cejas (eyebrows).  My precious cejas!!!  Ok, I’m done….and no, there will be no pictures.

-If all of that wasn’t enough, it was hot as all I don’t know what yesterday…by the end of the day it looked like I had put rollers on my ends.

- The only saving grace: Mama was walking around looking and feeling like a million bucks.  She also felt the need to mention more than a few times how beautiful and long my hair is and how “nice it looks like that”.

I can’t help but read between the lines.  Curly hair = thumbs down.  Straight hair = thumbs up.  I know where it comes from.  I see it every time I sit down to watch a novela…its amazing how many milky toned, blond haired, blue eyed, hazel eyed, straight haired latinos there are on ALL these programs!  I have yet to see one woman whom I identify with.  I know this isn’t the basis for why my grandmother thinks my straight hair es muy lindo but, I do know that it’s a microcosm of what is relayed to us on a daily basis.  If it looks white and smells white then its white and white is good.  If it looks anything less than that, well then, its less than.  I refuse to subscribe to that…and if wearing my hair curly day in and day out is my mini revolution well then so be it.