Transcript | Ep. 125: Untangling Hair Pt. 2: Color Schemes
Jessica: Life is too short at this point for me to, like, spend hours coloring my hair so that I can meet someone else's beauty standard when the fact is like my hair looks great and it's totally fine. And maybe I don't look as young as I used to, but maybe I look better, you know, and I just have not look back at all. I don't regret it at all.
[theme music]
Caroline: Hey y’all, and welcome to Unladylike. I’m Caroline.
Cristen: I’m Cristen. This episode is part 2 of 3 in our series all about head hair, and today, we're talking all about hair color.
Caroline: Which, Cristen, is perfect timing! I’m actually going to get a fresh coat of red dye at the salon right after we record.
Cristen: OK, I'm now imagining them, like rolling it on as if like painting a wall, like a fresh coat.
Caroline: Yeah for sure
Cristen: That's how it works, right? So, OK, what is your natural hair color, Caroline, and why red?
Caroline: Ok, well I think I’m drawn to red so much because it’s so vibrant compared to my natural bland light brown with just like the tiniest little flecks of red in it. And so basically I’ve been trying to get away from this natural hair color forever. Actually, the first time I ever tried dyeing my hair, I used maroon manic panic, which was like the tiniest little slice of rebellion for middle school me. But years later, I actually tried like red, red, real red for the first time. I was like that. That's it. Holy shit. I feel so much more like myself. So what is your hair color status?
Cristen: My hair color status is struggling. I am brunette, and I have grays coming in, and I had been dyeing it home fairly regularly, but it's in that in-between phase right now where, like, my roots are coming in and I don't know, I've been going back and forth about what to do with my grays because growing up, like my mom dyed her hair blond, or has dyed her hair blond for as long as I can remember. And a number of years ago, I was having dinner with my parents and I asked my mom whether she'd ever stop dyeing her hair and go gray. And before she could even answer, my dad interjects and says, oh, God, no, it'll wash her out.
Caroline: Oh, lord.
Cristen: I mean I was kind of flabbergasted at first, like, OK, that's absurd. But fast forward to when my first gray hair started coming in around my face. Like, all I could hear was my dad's voice being like, “Oh, you look so washed out.” And ever since then I've pretty much started, like, regularly dying away my grays. So I guess what I'm saying is, Caroline, I blame my dad. I blame my dad.
Caroline: Oh, no. Well listen, there's a whole rainbow of hair colors and shades for us to explore in this episode.
Cristen: And to help us do that, we're first talking to Jessica Berger Gross. Jessica is a writer based in Maine, and she's all about embracing the gray. We talked to her over Zoom.
Jessica: For me, it's been super liberating. I can't express that enough how liberating the process has been, how any shame I ever felt about gray hair, now I can't. It's hard to it's hard to even remember that because having full on gray hair has been dare I say really empowering.
Caroline: Then later, we’re talking to Jameson Hampton, who goes by Jamey. Jamey prefers bright, colors - and when I say bright, I mean, like orange and teal. To Jamey, dyeing their hair is a way not only to feel good, but also to control how people see them.
Jameson: I think that gender identity is the kind of thing that you have to explore to really understand it about yourself. Because it's like scary when I was first, like, realizing I was trans and coming out, like I felt anxious about it a lot and being - like using my hair as kind of part of that made it more comfortable for me, it's just kind of fun to use wild colors and make bold choices in a way that feels kind of safe.
Cristen: It’s all to find out: What does our hair color say about us?
Caroline: First up, let’s go gray.
[stinger]
Jessica: I was born with a really nice, sort of auburny brown glistening in the sunlight, Yeah, sort of like little strands of red partially created by the sun of southern Long Island.
Cristen: That former Long Islander is Jessica Berger Gross. When Jessica was in her late 20s, she started noticing some stray grays creeping into /those her auburn brown.
Jessica: I started hearing from stylists that it was - what's the color they say when it's you have brown hair that's like not kind of shiny and amazing looking anymore?
Caroline: like mousey or?
Jessica: Mousey. Yeah, exactly.
Caroline: Oh god.
Jessica: It’s lookin a little mousey. We could do something to like make it shinier or make it - just brighten it or. So maybe the first time I was offered a glaze, you know, and then then it's like highlights and so it kind of went from there.
Caroline: Soon, Jessica was highlighting and coloring her hair every few months.
Jessica: It didn't seem to me that I had a choice about whether or not to color my hair because I still wanted to look young, and I wanted to look, you know, pretty and I wanted to look professional, even like professional for a writer. And so, yeah, I just kept doing it and spending money on it. It was not a fun process.
Cristen: Especially once Jessica's grays got more stubborn
Jessica: It's not just, oh, every few months I'm getting highlights. It's every month, I must go get my hair colored. And I would - I live in the middle of Maine. And I would drive through blizzards, sometimes down to Portland, to the big city to an hour, 20 minutes each way when I probably should have been working or doing something else, sit in a chair for hours, and it didn't look that amazing, to tell you the truth. The grayer my hair became and the more resistant, the more it was like a Mitt Romney sort of brown.
Cristen: You've got the mousy brown then the Mitt brown.
Caroline: How did you feel when you first started noticing those grays coming in?
Jessica: In the beginning, it was like I didn't really know it was happening it was so gradual for me. And then once it was, you know, real gray, resistant, gray, large portion of the percentage of my hair, I felt like I was losing my youth. And like I was losing, you know, any sense of possibility of beauty. That's where like the shame came in and I just felt like, wow, I feel really old all of a sudden every month when the gray hair would come back, I would definitely feel pretty intense sense of shame about my roots. And I would be, you know, finding hats and finding headbands and finding schmattes and finding ways to cover up my roots because I really didn't want anyone to see them. I was super self-conscious about it. As if I was doing something wrong by you know growing out this gray hair and have it because it was like gray hair or something I was hiding, so I was supposed to hide it. And so when it came out, I felt weird about it. Embarrassed a little bit ashamed, not like super consciously, but subconsciously for sure.
Cristen: Did the self-consciousness about your grays catch you by surprise at all?
Jessica: No, honestly, because I think I sort of grew up feeling bad about different things about my body. As so many of us do. I was worried as a kid about my weight that I was chubby, quote unquote. I worried about my nose because my mother, when I was 16, told me that she’d had a nose job and that she'd pay for me to have one. There are so many things growing up in our culture for being a woman that I was made to - that made me question different aspects of my looks that, no, it wasn't surprising to me that there would be something else that would come at me that I’d, you know, have to struggle to not feel bad about.
Caroline: Eventually, Jessica’s hair became resistant to the dye. She’d spend hours driving to and from the salon only to come back home, wash her hair and realize that the color hadn’t taken.
Jessica: So then I’d, you know, maybe message my stylist and she'd be like, I'm so sorry. I think we need to do it again or leave it in longer. I'll do it. You know, no extra charge. It meant, you know, like going back to Portland another day. It was cuckoo. But I would do it because I had just spent all this money and time, and it hadn't worked. And then that's when it got - that's really - actually that would be when the Mitt Romney shoe polish, because she sort of changed what she was using and she was like, we have to get more intense, you know? And she was probably an early person, I think, who really encouraged me. Like, “Maybe you don't want to do this anymore,” you know
Cristen: This was right after the 2016 election, and Jessica started to take on a more ‘fuck you’ kind of attitude towards her looks and what other people thought of her. She also started noticing women with eye-catching silver hair around town.
Jessica: Yeah so I remember it all came to a head. There's this amazing country fair called Common Ground Country Fair in September every year in Maine. It's makers, it's everything from people weaving to animals to like, imagine Little House on the Prairie, but like the ultimate version, you know, today. And there are a lot of women there who had really beautiful gray hair, like, imagine kind of long gray braids down your back, you know, super crunchy, gorgeous, organicy, quote unquote, looking women. That definitely spoke to me.
Caroline: Once winter hit, Jessica decided it was time to let her grays grow out. To ease the transition, she bought two cute hats and wore them all winter long — which in Maine is pretty long! By spring, she was ready to get a pixie cut and let her grays grow naturally.
Cristen: So, what was the biggest factor in you deciding to stop dying your hair?
Jessica: I mean, For someone who, like, you know, won't wear high heels, doesn't wear much makeup ever, like barely diffuses my hair for 30 seconds, I am vain, like I'm as vain as the next vain person. I definitely want to look good. I wouldn't have done it if I thought I would look worse. Occasionally, like, don't get me wrong, I will glance at myself sometimes in the mirror or a photo if it's like taken not in the best way and be like, wow, I look like I'm 80. But generally speaking, I actually feel for what it's worth, I feel prettier than I did before, for sure, and and I'm saving so much money and time and I just like the feeling of not feeling frantic about my roots coming in. Oh, and now it's fun because now I have long gray hair and I can play with it and get cool haircuts. And, you know, it's so much cheaper to get a cool haircut than get your hair colored. It's just more fun. I just feel better about myself this way.
Cristen: Well, what does your gray hair say about you these days?
Jessica: I think it says I have a certain level of comfort with who I am, with being in my body, with my age. I think there’s so much - when I was younger there was so much trying, in my career, to be a mother took me a lot of effort to kind of have a child, moving around, just like in every aspect of my life. For me, there was a lot of trying and I think that's true for a lot of us. And then now at 49, there's a level of comfort and kind of knowing myself. Like life is too short at this point for me to, like, spend hours coloring my hair so that I can you know meet someone else's beauty standard when the fact is like my hair looks great and it's totally fine. And, you know, there's just a lot of other stuff to do. And in terms of the whole young question, I mean, the fact is, I am not young. I just turned 49. So I'm definitely not young. I'm far from young, and that should be OK and great. And I'm grateful to be alive. And I am so much better inside in my head than I was 10 years ago
Cristen: So, Jessica, before we let you go. I’ve gotta share that I - I am going gray. You know? That is the truth. And I’m really curious to hear, like, when your gray hair started happening, what was the pattern? If I don’t dye my hair, my grays start like on the sideburns and kind of like around my crown, so it just sort of surrounds my face. And to me, it's a very unflattering pattern. So I'm wondering like what were the gray patterns that were coming in for you?
Jessica: Root line, super root line. It kind of reminded me of I was like a drama theater kid growing up. And when we’d look old for a part and they put like the gray in your hair, you'd still have it at the root like after the show it was like that. So it was just hardcore gray roots. By the way, what you're saying tells me that if you do decide to do this, it will probably look really nice.
Cristen: Really?
Jessica: Yes. Because the thing that's amazing about when you let it come in is nature is giving you highlights for free.
Cristen: OK, Jessica, you're blowing my mind right now, I'd never even considered this.
Caroline: Can I just break in and say that Cristen Conger's gray hair looks amazing because it is coming in in like very specific places, like at the sideburns. I just - as an outsider, I just want to say that it looks good.
Cristen: OK now you're blowing my mind, Caroline.
Jessica: You look so good. If you do this, please do this.
Cristen: This is just I had no idea this interview was really going to change a lot for me.
Jessica: like you can totally do it because you're going to feel you're going to have this confidence. I mean, hello, you're the host of the Unladylike podcast.
Cristen: Oh, I love this.
Jessica: What could be more on brand for you?
Cristen: It’s true.
Jessica: I mean, you have this is like your you have to do this almost. I mean, I would never tell anyone they had to do this, but it's almost like you do have to. And at least and then report back.
Caroline: All right Cristen, I’m going to be expecting that report now!
Cristen: Oh God. Do I have a deadline?
Caroline: No, take your time!
Cristen: OK, all right. I’ll get that to you then. I’ll get that to you.
Caroline: All right y’all, we’re going to take a quick break.
Cristen: When we come back, we get to the bottom of how women were taught to hate their grays, AND we play a colorful game.
Caroline: Don’t wash away!
[stinger]
Caroline: We’re back. So, how did we get here? As in, how did women dyeing away their grays become such a given?
Cristen: Well, the fact is, gray hair has never had a great reputation. Humans have been shading their hair since ancient history with like henna and other natural dyes. But the expectation that women should hide away their grays really took off in the early 1900s when chemical hair dyes arrived on the scene.
Caroline: Even though it was relatively taboo at first. Back in the 1930s and 40s, for instance, some salons actually offered private entrances and exits just so women getting their color done could slip in and out unnoticed!
Cristen: Oh my god, just like celebrities. And then, though, with the rise of at-home hair dyes, women were urged to cover up their grays in the privacy of their own homes. Just listen to this Clairol ad from 1957.
[CLIP - Clairol ad]
Male Voiceover: Does she or doesn't she? Does or doesn't she?
Woman Hairdresser: Color her hair? Well, that's her own affair, really. But this I will say with Miss Clairol, the color looks so natural, only your hairdresser knows for sure. We hairdressers see the most wonderful changes take place. Hair like this, for instance, dull streaked with gray. Even with this perfect makeup, she looks faded, unattractive. Now see her after Miss Clairol. In minutes, she looks years younger. Her hair sparkles with radiant color. The gray is hidden, and the hair itself is so silky, so ladylike.
Male Voiceover: Does she or doesn't she?
Cristen: Well Caroline, does she or doesn’t she?
Caroline: We may never know.
Cristen: So ladylike. In the late 1960s, Clairol kicked the gray shaming into high gear to sell their new line of gray-coverage hair dye called Loving Care.
[CLIP - Clairol ad]
Woman: My gray hair makes me feel so old. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to wash that gray right out of my hair. I'm going to wash that gray right outta my hair.
Voiceover: Loving Care color lotion from Clairol washes away your gray and washes in your own natural color. Loving Care is different. It's gentle. It has no peroxide or ammonia.
Woman: So I washed that gray….
Cristen: Loving Care was wildly successful. And wildly manipulative. So, the advertising whiz who came up with that campaign — and the ‘does she or doesn’t she’ ad — was actually a WOMAN named Shirley Polykoff. In her autobiography, Shirley describes her strategy to get as many graying women as possible to buy Clairol. She wrote: “This could only be accomplished by reawakening whatever dissatisfactions they may have had when they first spotted [the gray].”
Caroline: Lord, that is nefarious as fuck. I mean, OK, so, in other words, Clairol and Shirley needed to teach ALL women to hate their grays. So ads would say stuff like, ladies HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN SINCE YOUR HUSBAND BROUGHT YOU FLOWERS? Perhaps it’s been a very long time. Ever since you’ve gone gray, you old hag!
Cristen: Yeah, yeah! The subtext was gray equals unattractive and worthless and you will turn into a pile of dust if you don’t dye your hair STAT. But people project all sorts of assumptions onto non-gray natural hair colors, too. Especially women’s hair color.
Caroline: Oh yeah. I mean, research on hair color perceptions shows just how much we tend to buy into all the usual hair stereotypes-- like the notion that brunettes are the smartest, blondes are agreeable, and redheads are temperamental. There was one study on hair color stereotyping in women's job interviews that found that brunette candidates were offered significantly higher salaries than blonde and redhead applicants. Hm.
Cristen: There’s also a whole bunch of study findings around how like cis, het men find blondes more attractive, leave them larger tips and are likelier to pick them up while hitchhiking
Caroline: Huh.
Cristen: Yeah. A lot of a lot of scientific research devoted to answering the question of “Do blondes really have more fun?” I shit you not.
Caroline: Well, apparently they have more hitchhiking.
Cristen: And more tips, so I don’t know. Yeah, I don’t know actually if that does sound all that more fun. But Caroline, I do have something fun for you. Are you ready to play a game that I’m calling Questions I’m DYEING to Ask Caroline About Hair Colors? Get it. Dyeing.
Caroline: Boy, am I.
Cristen: Since I know you love digging way back in history. Under the Roman Empire, sex workers were required to keep their hair what color?
Caroline: Blonde?
Cristen: Ding, ding.
Caroline: Woo!
Cristen: Do you know why?
Carolin: Hmm, no, actually I don’t, I was trying to come up with a like a quirky reason, but I've got nothing. The pressure's too great.
Cristen: Because the Romans knew blonds have more fun too! No, actually, the answer is much darker.
Caroline: Oh.
Cristen: So, yeah, it was actually because of when the Roman Empire expanded northward, where blond hair is more common, blond women became exoticized, and they were often forced into sexual slavery -
Caroline: oh shit
Cristen: - by the conquering Romans.
Caroline: Oh shit!
Cristen: Question 2. All right. So in 1910, what company was renamed L'Oreal, as in today's beauty behemoth? Was it a) the French Harmless Hair Dye Company? B) the Look, This Hair Dye Is Real Company or C) What's French for I Swear This Hair Dye Won't Kill You Company LLC
Caroline: The LLC is critical. Um, A?
Cristen: Yes, you are correct. The French Harmless Hair Dye Company was the original name of L'Oreal, and it's all because its founder and chemist, this guy Eugene, was trying to get ahead of customer concerns about side effects because a lot of the early hair dyes were pretty toxic.
Caroline: Yeah.
Cristen: And for instance, Caroline, when Hollywood blond starlet Jean Harlow died pretty young in 1937, some people mistakenly assumed that it was her years of hair bleaching that were to blame.
Caroline: It's funny with that name, it's like me thinks the chemist doth protest too much.
Cristen: Yeah, that's I guess he's probably like, you know what, let's just go with L'Oreal. Let's just go with L'Oreal and hope that nobody, nobody notices. All right. #3 is might be my favorite. All right. A 1914 fashion column in the Pittsburgh Press advised readers who are, quote, simply dying, that's DYE, dying to be fashionable - advised them to dye their hair, what color?
Caroline: What year?
Cristen: 1914.
Caroline: Huh, to be more fashionable.
Cristen: Mm hmm.
Caroline: Oh, like an auburn color?
Cristen: I'm sorry, I'm sorry, you're wrong. No, the answer is pink.
Caroline: Oh, whoa, whoa.
Cristen: Yeah, yeah.
Caroline: I was not even in the ballpark.
Cristen: The full quote was, “If you are simply dying to be fashionable, then choose a bright shade of cerise for pink hair is the pink of fashionable perfection.”
Caroline: Well, I love that history because, like, one of the hair color stats around the pandemic is that so many people dyed their hair pink at the start of isolation, that like it actually started to be referred to as pandemic pink. So I had no idea there was like a trendy history there.
Cristen: Caroline, pandemic pink is exactly the reason why I included this question in our game.
Caroline: Love it.
Cristen: OK, final question. Get ready to rage. Fill in the blank. In 1967, Time magazine declared changing hair color is almost as enduring a female experience as what?
Caroline: OK, you said get ready to rage. So it's as enduring a female experience as … like PMS?
Cristen: In the ballpark. Pregnancy.
Caroline: Oh, yeah, that was going to be my follow up one. Yeah.
Cristen: And I guess rage might have been too strong a word, but their proof for this was, quote, Surveys show that the average woman thinks about it for nine months before she decides to change her shade for the first time. Which like what? How does that. I don't know that those two things that logic tracks, but OK
Caroline: They're like, how can we just work in an insult to women somehow?
Cristen: But also that Time magazine article is a testament to Shirley Polykoff.
Caroline: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Ol Shirl.
Cristen: For Shirl.
Caroline: For Shirl.
Cristen: And when I'm saying for Shirl, then it means it's time to take a quick break.
Caroline: When we come back, Jamey Hampton shares an intriguing theory on why nonbinary folks have excellent hair
Cristen: Stick around!
[stinger]
Caroline: We’re back.
Cristen: The first time Jamey Hampton dyed their hair, they were in sixth grade.
Jameson: I had been asking my mom for a couple of years at that point, I wanted to dye my hair purple when I was a kid, I was like very attached to the concept of purple specifically. And she said, no, mm, we're not doing that. And then one day I came to her and I said I want to dye my hair red because I want to look like Dana Scully. And and she said, OK. She was so relieved that I wasn't asking to dye it purple anymore that she said, OK.
Caroline: OK, so why Dana Scully in particular?
Jameson: I was just - I was very into the X Files when I was a kid. I ran like an X Files fan website on like Geocities
Cristen and Caroline: Yes.
Jameson: And I just thought that Dana Scully was, like, so powerful and beautiful, and I wanted to be like her.
Caroline: Once they got to college, Jamey started experimenting with all kinds of fun colors and styles, like short spiky updos, shaved undercuts or unexpected colors like teal blue.
Cristen: And around 2014, when Jamey came out as trans, they started thinking more about what other folks were reading into their bold hair color choices.
Jameson: I was feeling preoccupied with how having colored hair might cause people to perceive me and my gender, because it doesn't necessarily make sense to me logically that like having a bright color of hair is like a gendered female thing. But people kind of associate it that way, I think. And so I wasn't ready to not be doing that to my hair because it felt like such a part of me. And it was like empowering in a lot of ways. But I had been doing a lot of like light blues and purples and pinks, and I decided that, like all of those colors made people perceive me more feminine than I wanted. And so right after I came out as trans, I went like bright orange for like a while. And I haven't I - I liked it. I haven't again since then. But like I definitely say, I associate the bright orange with, like, the very early stages of, like, my transition.
Caroline: So we actually found you through an essay you wrote for InStyle magazine a few years ago. It was called “Hair That Comes Out for You.” In it, you write, “Hi, my name is Jameson and I'm non binary. If you don't know what that means, it means I have great hair.” So, can you explain what that all means?
Jameson: I guess it’s just a trend I’ve noticed. I know a lot of non-binary people, and I think we all have really great hair, but I guess I do have a theory as to why that is other than just like an observation about the world. And I think that doing unusual things with your hair, like coloring it or signature haircuts and things like this can be a really empowering way of like exerting control over not just the way you look, but the way that other people perceive you. And so as a nonbinary person I feel - I have - I stress about how other people perceive me to some extent. Um you know I can't control if people want to perceive me as like a woman, even though I'm not a woman. But I can control that like the first thing that their brain is going to attach to when they look at me is like this wild thing that I've done with my hair, and to me that feels powerful. And it's an easy thing to do, and it's a temporary thing to do, so that's also powerful because you can change your mind in a way that you can't with other - some other things about your appearance.
Cristen: When did you first start noticing or really thinking about queer hair expression?
Jameson: I think the thing that put the wheels turning on it was like the more queer folks that I spent time with, and particularly the more like trans and non-binary folks that I spent a lot of time with. I would notice that often a whole group of us would have different colored hair and all of these things. And it was at a time when in my life, when I was feeling like when I was in a group of people, I often stuck out and there weren't other people that, like, looked like me. And so to be in a group of other queer people, it was this moment of like, oh, I'm in this group of people and I don't stick out, like these people look like me. And I think that’s when I started realizing like the connection between hair and queerness.
Caroline: How do you think hair color a queer signifier and and when you do spot somebody out, like with like crazy colored hair, fun colored hair, like, do you recognize each other?
Jameson: I think I'm pretty good at recognizing, like other queer folks when I see them on the street or whatever. And I do feel a kinship with them and I don't I couldn't explain to you exactly like what it is about someone that I saw that made me feel that way, like it's a little bit less tangible than that. But I do think that the hair is often part of it. And I think that it's partially like, oh, maybe queer folks have a tendency to do these kind of things with their hair. But I do think to some extent there's also like a purposeful. Like when I do my hair, I want people to read me as queer on the street. I want other queer folks at least to be able to read me as queer on the street, like, hey, I'm here and I'm like you in this way, which is something that queer people have been doing for all of history with different kinds of signifiers. A couple that I really like are in the Renaissance period, queer folks would wear like a dark blue feather in their hat, and that was meant to be like a queer signifier. And then in the more Victorian era, the green carnation became like a secret signal between queer people. And that was because Oscar Wilde popularized it. I feel drawn to the idea of being able to signal people in that way, partially because, you know, I've met cool people in that way and partially because it kind of feels like part of this more ancient history of queer folks throughout history, and I really like that.
Caroline: I just want to circle back to the very beginning and just just reaffirm that Dana Scully is an excellent hair color role model.
Jameson: I can't be the only one.
Caroline: I also -
Jameson: People are going to listen to this and be like, oh, yeah, I also dye my hair red because of Dana Scully. I feel so seen.
Caroline: I think you're right.
Cristen: You can find Jessica on Twitter @jbergergross or jessicabergergross.com and Jamey is over at jameybash.com - jamey
Caroline: You can find us on instagram, facebook and Twitter @unladylikemedia. You can also support Cristen and me by joining our Patreon; you’ll get weekly ad-free bonus episodes like our recent breakdown of New Yorker investigation into Britney Spears’ conservatorship and our undying love at patreon.com/unladylikemedia.
Cristen: Nora Ritchie is the senior producer of Unladylike. Michele O’Brien is our associate producer. Gianna Palmer is our story editor. Shruti Marathe transcribes our tape. Our music is by Flamingo Shadow, Amit May Cohen and Sarah Tudzin. Mixing is by Andi Kristins. Sound design and additional music is by Casey Holford and Andi Kristins. Executive producers are Peter Clowney, Daisy Rosario and Unladylike Media.
Caroline: This podcast was created by your hosts, Caroline Ervin
Cristen: And Cristen Conger of Unladylike Media.
Caroline: Next week...
Supriya Surender: It was just so crazy, so sad. I would wake up every morning and hope that this was it, that my hair was going to stop falling and then I would get up and it would just be immediately falling. And all day long I would feel it on my arms while I was driving, while I was working just this nonstop reminder that it was happening. And they tell you, you try not to get too stressed. Stress can make it worse, which is just like, okay, I'll try that, but.
Cristen: The ol ‘just relax’ treatment works.
Supriya: Works swimmingly.
Cristen: It’s our final installment in our head hair series and for that we’re talking with blogger Supriya Surender about her experience with alopecia areata. We’ll also meet hair-loss hairstylist Dorin Azerad.
Caroline: You don’t want to miss this episode, or this entire series! Make sure you’re subscribed to Unladylike. Find us in stitcher, spotify, apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Cristen: And remember, got a problem?
Caroline: Get Unladylike.
