pink hair

Pink Hair No 6 (7?) I saw this Saturday at Hot Springs resort. She looked like the others...sort of, well, badger-y, one local puts it.

There is a New Hairdresser in town. Which means we murungu (white) madams now have the princely choice of two (three if you count Earl but he's mainly for the kids and the wash-and-set generation). New Hairdresser's advent -- "from Jo'burg," the whispers go, "she had her own salon there" -- has caused no little consternation. First, if you go to New Hairdresser, will Long Established Old Hairdresser find out? And if Long Established Old finds out and is (as is likely) aggrieved, will you be able to go back to her if, heaven forbid, New Hairdresser should leave? Old Hairdresser has been in town for more than a decade: at present she's located on the near-deserted first floor of a department store, her salon complete with huge posters of pageboy cuts and perms straight from the 1980s. She knows everything about everybody. When her son announced his split from his wife, locals whispered the ex would never be able to get her hair done again, not in this town at least: Old Hairdresser would slit her throat.

The problem with Old, though, the madams whisper, is that she uses The Cap to do highlights, a close-fitting plastic thing with holes in to let her hook through strands of your hair. It's an instrument of mediaeval torture if ever there was one: you may come out of the salon with highlights but you'll also come out minus half a head of hair.

Chiefly because of The Cap, the madams have migrated. New Hairdresser can do foils, they tell each other. New Hairdresser operates from her home in the grassy suburbs (Her husband, it's rumoured, works in the diamond fields not far from Hot Springs). New Hairdresser cuts a shiny, shapely bob but she has one weakness - a predilection for pink stripes. She adds them to every other white madam's hair-do: does she ask them first, I wonder? Pink is her personal signature. It's also the best way she's got to thumb her nose at Old.

*And no, I do not have pink stripes. My husband cuts my hair.