My Crowning Glory: Bald Is Not The New Black

In less than 58 hours my husband and I will be singing the paperwork for the first home we’ve ever owned. Y’all, I thought this building process was the tough part. Turns out, packing, purging, and the sleep I’m losing over where to put things in our new house may be what causes me to go bald.

I will not be a pretty bald woman. My scalp has a funky indention at the top from a car accident when I was a little girl (head meet window) and thanks to middle age and PCOS, my hair has been steadily thinning over the years.

This is a travesty (Insert dramatic flair)! I’m a Southern woman. Our hair is called our crowning glory for a reason! Stories have been written about our hair. Legends made of it. Sure, it has led us to be the butt of jokes for many years due to the sheer volume, but that’s beside the point.

Let me explain. Unless you’ve visited the South during the summer, let’s say anytime from the end of March until early October, you won’t have context. To help you gain perspective, go put a pot of water on the stove to boil. Go on, I’ll wait. Cut the heat up in the house until it is a toasty 95 degrees. Now, grab a towel, go to the pot of boiling water with your perfectly coiffed do (and a full face of makeup), lean over said pot in the 95 degrees heat and throw a towel over your head. Stay in that position for at least 1o minutes.

If you don’t want to do this in your house, go to your local sauna dressed for a formal event and step in fully dressed while wearing stockings and heels. That stuff melting down your face if your makeup, hair and any product you’ve put in your hair to keep it in place.

We make our hair big to help combat the heat and humidity. There is a reason Aqua Net is the shellac of The South. Blue haired ladies trail a heady cloud after their weekly fluff and puff at the beauty parlor; that fresh set has to survive a week. Southern women must face the world with their crowning glory done to perfection and football helmet strong.  You’ll soon understand after you survive walking down the sidewalk day after day in conditions that will melt the rubber on the soles of your Havianas.

Big hair is a necessity. If we didn’t give it some lift at the roots (and I’m not talking about 1980’s hair), it would be plastered to our foreheads and that is just low rent. Like getting down and doing the limbo low.

Am I a little nervous? Sure, who wouldn’t be? I’m more worried about the state of my manicure and the day filled with business meetings I have tomorrow. While that sounds vain, I am very much aware of my vanity and keep it in check for the most part. Well, as in check as you can when you’ve been raised with the constant reminder to “suck your stomach in and put some color on.”

But, as Scarlett O’Hara famously said, “with God as my witness, I shall never have flat hair again!!”*

*She never really said that, but she should have