Please Note: The 11 Products I Now Rely On To Achieve My Effortless, Shiny, Quietly Affluent Country-Club Hair.
Prescribed by my elite fleet, this best-in-class hair restoration protocol is designed for those discreetly navigating hair loss
I subscribe to the notion that one’s power and influence can be markedly enhanced simply by feeling confident—if not a little cocky—about one’s hair. For a woman or a man, hair can become the defining iconography: the Platonic ideal—the pristine blueprint from which countless attempts at duplication inevitably fall short.
Would John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, twenty-five years after their fatal plane crash, still captivate a nation and flood the algorithms were it not for the hair? Would gentlemen really prefer blondes if it were not for Howard Hawks’ Marilyn Monroe? Did Clark Kent stand a chance at being not just a man, but a superman, if it weren’t for the kiss curl?
The vitality, the cut, the color, the thickness and density, the softness, the shine—all of it matters in the stylist’s pursuit of that undeniable, nonchalant glamour. Or, as teenage boys now call it: aura.
It is the unadulterated sex appeal that can unsettle a room, break up a happy home, or, in its more savage register, become the nucleus of romantic obsession—the scent of her perfume lingering on a pillow long after she has gone, powerful enough to inspire longing, folly, a marriage proposal; and, in the case of the unrequited, a jealous rage followed by a headline police investigation.
As a wide-eyed, impressionable fourteen-year-old—perhaps an inappropriately young one—I, like a fresh-out-the-box sponge, soaked up three films: Goodbye, Columbus, Rosemary’s Baby, and Scarface. All of them, for me—like for most teenage girls—were not so much Hollywood movies as scripture, shaping our romantic relationship to fashion and beauty and, in my case, fueling the majority of my life choices over the decades that followed. I toggle between the three depending on my mood: quietly affluent country-club polish, gamine and severe never without a dangling skinny cigarette, or cocaine-fueled, high-gloss armor, crossing and uncrossing my legs.
Also, it bears repeating: as a double Aries, I possess an irrepressible urge to rearrange the furniture ad nauseam. As a teenager, unable to afford the salon, I became a house model for Vidal Sassoon—which meant I could cut and color my hair whenever I pleased.
I wore it red with a bruised lip stain. I wore it platinum blonde with dirty kohl liner and what felt like entire tubes of mascara. I wore it dyed to match my natural brown, pulled into a high ponytail tied with a grosgrain ribbon. Reinvention was not a considered choice. It was instinct.
In my thirties, I moved to Los Angeles and cut it like Mia Farrow in 1966—razor-sharp, gamine, delicate, fragile. In my forties, I grew it long again and returned to platinum for good measure. Somewhere between the bleach, stress, depression, anxiety, perimenopause, a few bouts of COVID, and several attempts at tape-in extensions, I lost what might as well have been all of it.
I cut bangs to mask my visibly bare hairline. I cried. I saw a lot of dermatologists and other medical professionals. I sought second and third and fourth opinions, and after more than a year of trying everything, I designed a protocol and followed it consistently for eleven months—and it grew back. It grew back shiny, healthy, and bouncy. You know: quietly affluent country-club hair.
Somewhere between the bleach, stress, depression, anxiety, perimenopause, a few bouts of COVID, and several attempts at tape-in extensions, I lost what might as well have been all of it.
