The 50 best hairstyles of all time
Dunno, but it’s moot for me anyway, because most of these hairstyles are undoable for my type of hair, which features irrepressible waves/curls with a strong-willed mind of their own. That mind sometimes segues into outright frizz if I don’t take it firmly in hand and give it a serious talking-to. But on the few occasions I’ve been too stern, and blow-dried or ironed or otherwise forced it to straighten completely, I haven’t liked the results. Too severe for my face, no shine, and altogether too flattened. Nature seems to know best, with a little judicious coaxing.
Of all the hairstyles featured in the article, the only ones compatible with my hair type are #7, finger waves; #12, Diana Ross’s big curls (which I sometimes achieve even without meaning to); #13, Jessica Parker’s Sex and the City waves; and #15, Jackie Kennedy’s bouffant (oh boy, do I ever remember teasing, otherwise known as backcombing, at which I was a pro). Jackie must have had hair like mine, but in the days of setting on large rollers and the generous use of hairspray, she transformed it into her iconic do.
One hairdo the article skipped was Jennifer Beals in “Flashdance.” Can do:
Speaking of which, have you ever noticed one of those nearly-immutable facts of life: those of us with straight hair spend a lot of time wishing we had curly/wavy hair, and vice versa? I was disabused of that yearning myself early on, when I ironed my hair as a teenager (to emulate #8, Cher, and a celebrity who didn’t make the cut, Mary Travers of Peter Paul and Mary) and discovered, much to my great surprise, that I looked absolutely awful with straight hair.
[NOTE: And by the way, what’s up with the repeats of the photos in the article? There are nowhere near 50 there.]
Relatively early in life I came to the conclusion hair was wasted on women. The curly wanted to be straight, the straight wavy, the brunette blond, the blonde some tint of henna, and then there were those who couldn’t do without streaks of a different color. And then it’s men that lose their hair. Go figure.
George Pal: It appears the world is not fair.
It’s pretty much that way across the board. Your single friends want to be married and your married friends gripe about their spouses. Women seem to either want to get pregnant and can’t or gripe about getting pregnant too often or at the wrong time.
AMDG
I guess the best hairstyle is that which looks best on you and the one you don’t have to mess with every 15 seconds.
My hair must be about like yours. I tried much to hard to straighten it in the 60s, and I don’t know why because I lived in a really humid city and it didn’t stay that way for an hour. Now, I like it, which is good, because it gives me no choice.
AMDG
Straight haired girl here who always wanted natural curls. Spent many a night in pink sponge rollers during my childhood.
Seems to me that it’s easier to straighten curly hair that to force curls into fine, straight hair. Those curls simply don’t hold up for long….unless you have a (dreaded!) perm.
CV: Ah, believe me, it’s not easy to straighten hair and have it look good. Curly hair that’s straightened rarely has any shine, and it retains a sort of puffiness unless you straighten it bone-straight, which is rarely flattering. And then it frizzes up again quite easily. Plus, if you do a permanent straightening rather than a temporary one (with products rather than an iron), the roots grow in quickly and look different than the rest of the hair. Frizz at the roots is a telltale sign. And of course chemicals can damage the hair as well.
I don’t even try to straighten it because, as I said, I don’t look good in straight hair.
Whereas a person with straight hair can do any number of perms that are less damaging to hair than straightening agents, and setting hair on rollers, and curling irons, do pretty well if hair has any body at all, and the hair keeps its shine.
But I am one of the curly-haired people who doesn’t want straight hair.
Neo-neocon:
I can deal with unfair — it’s the counter intuitive and illogical I have a problem with.
Neo,
I guess this is one of those “grass is always greener” situations 🙂
Yeah, there are a lot of repeats, but they managed to miss Rene Russo’s haircut from ‘The Thomas Crown Affair’ and Helen Mirren’s haircut in Prime Suspect 2. Both of those styles are/were very common, and I’ve had stylist’s tell me Rene’s cut is one of the most common requests.
I’m one of those fine straight hair types that CV mentions, but my hair is super thick. I went through the teasing and rollers stuff in high school, but the weight of my hair always ruined everything. Then Kenneth came along (he was right before Vidal Sasoon) and allowed women to have straight, unteased hair. I decided to let a friend in college cut my hair that way, but she was so slow that I ended up cutting it myself.
I’ve stuck with this style for over 40 years with some changes in length. I have let hairdressers experiment a few times, but always after a few hours the weight wins out. I can’t even use barretts or bobby pins because they slide right off the fine hairs. The person who invented the bow dryer deserves a monument.
BTW, this stuff is hell on hot humid days.
The worst thing about fancy hairstyles is that the ravishing smell of female hair goes missing, replaced by something more like burning rubber. Taking away one of the best things in a man’s life for a bit of ‘style’ is a horrible mistake.
Hair is one of many reasons I am so glad to be XY, not XX. My haircut has basically been the same for 50 years- short. Why change it? I hate my straight hair venturing out over my ears or my forehead. It’s there to keep the sun off my scalp; it is still all there, sans grey. It does its job. I use the cheapest shampoo I can find and it never complains. I almost pity all you femmes, but hey, you want hair, you got it. I have had multiple encounters with women who were more upset about transient chemo baldness than about having breast cancer.
What I seriously dislike is the hairs that started growing on and in my ears in my later years. The ones on the outside are easy to trim, the ones inside are a pain to remove and remove them I must or else my ears itch. Ugh.
However, women and their hair is an endless battle. My wife has curly red hair that is heavily streaked with grey. She has given up on coloring her hair to hide the grey, but every other month she goes to a ‘stylist’ for a ‘cut’ and is rarely happy with the results. It does no good to tell her she looks beautiful. I hope her ‘hair wars’ end within the next 10 yrs.
Back in the 1970s my straight-haired sister got a frizzy/curly hair treatment. It was called an “Anglo.” [It might also have been called a “Little Orphan Annie,” as my sister had a reddish tinge to her hair.]
The “Anglo” was changed for something more Anglo within several months.
Face facts. A babe like Jennifer can wear anything and have any kind of hair style. No hair style or clothing will make ugly girls attractive.
LOL.
…and eyebrows that even the haircutter wants to trim. And rampant nose hair.
Vanity is …hard …and rarely achieved …for old men.