Postcoifal
As a little girl, you are awash in varieties of doll hair. Barbie hair in perms to represent animal trainers, stewardesses, nurses; Little Pony hair in a pointless sherbet swoop meant to balance the horse face and Miss Piggy deadeye of the creature it’s attached to. I had something called a “Dolly Surprise” where you crooked its arm like a bicycle pump and it grew crimped hair.
When you took the dolls out of their twist-tie girdles, the scent was plastic ester-berry, neon scented, a la Cap’n Crunch. It lived in a greasy film coating the strands that left wax all over your hands the way Crunch Berries left it on the roof of your mouth. This is the smell I most identify with being a girl between age 4 and age 9 and as such something I wouldn’t mind smelling like to this day: a perfume whose print ad would be a young Christie Brinkley baking Play-Doh cupcakes in an Easy Bake oven.
Fresh out of the box, doll hair captured your junior visions of being a hot California babe in bicycle shorts, rollerblading down the Santa Monica pier with a cascade of blond swinging pendulum-like behind you. But once you engaged with it, delved into its coarse vinyl horse hair texture with your hot little hands, the cherry was popped, the decline imminent: almost instantly it became a frayed, dried out wad, as if the Crunch Berry wax was some kind of vital plasma that killed its host if removed.
At that point you could only twist the hair around your fingers, tie it up in glitter Goodie hair elastics so that it stood vertical, the elastic out of all proportion with the doll it was bonded to. At some point in your endless frustration you’d cut the hair, or dye it with markers, ink, attempting to make it speak; craft an impeccable coif that movie magic made you believe you were capable of just with your fingers and sheer will. At this point the doll passed from the realm of split ends to hysterical electro-shock hair, the creepy plugs of vinyl visible on the scalp.
The trajectory here is evidently one of defilement. The hair was an invitation, a request to destroy. The shelves of a six-year old are full of dead sailors, each Barbie and rubberized friend binned, the frizzled hair just a tool for post-mortem identification. And so always the Christmas-time beckoning for the new—the smell—the promised reprieve of motile blond: youthful, supernaturally glinting hair effervescing like Shirley Temple bubbles.
