Hair Styling At Home In The Covid Lock Down

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Have you tried hair styling at home during the covid lockdown?

How did it go for you? Are you ready to show your new “do”, or has hair styling at homemade you hope the social isolation continues for a few more weeks?

When the pandemic lockdown started, one of the last things anyone thought about was a haircut. And why would they? It couldn’t be more than a couple, few weeks. Or so we all thought. But five or six weeks later I was reading that people were “tired” of the social isolation. That a lot of people “just want to go out and get a haircut”.

Well, I considered myself fortunate. You see about 12 years ago, my wife bought me a Flowbee for my birthday. I didn’t pay a hairstylist for a decade after that. My apologies to the stylists out there, but when I first moved to California, people I met were paying $60 to see their regular stylist. I couldn’t pay that, so I went to the chain places. You know – “Hair Style Factory”, and “One-Style-For-All” kind of places.

The Classic Flowbee

At these chain salons I would tell the “stylist”, please leave some length on the sides and in the back. Please don’t use the clippers to do that tapered length thing at the end. But they just couldn’t help themselves. Since my hair is what they call “fine” (the strands are each thin), not coarse, if it gets too short on the sides it sticks straight out. Then I have to wait for a couple of weeks while looking stupid for it to get long enough to lie flat again. But by then other parts would be in dire need of a trim. So my Flowbee has been a real blessing.

Well, in my opinion it has.

Of course one thing we had to keep in mind all these years is you can’t use a Flowbee with an upright vacuum that doesn’t have a hose attachment.

Do you remember the Flowbee? It was a smallish yellow and black plastic contraption on the end of an air hose. The hose would connect to a vacuum cleaner and it would suck your hair through a rectangular spacer and cut it to that length. If you wanted your hair cut shorter, you used a shorter spacer on the end. Want your hair to be four inches long all over? Use the four-inch spacer. Want your hard a little shorter? Use the two-inch spacer.

It’s kind of hard to describe these things since they were so unique. So here’s the Wikipedia article about them
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowbee

And here’s a you tube video showing people using one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK7_VSpTyVY

The Flowbee Style

Here’s a picture of how my hair was looking when using the Flowbee and a vacuum to “style” my own hair at the beginning of social isolation.

Before my hairstyling at home experiment

But here’s the deal – I worked pretty hard on that coiffure. But of course eventually it was time to trim it again.

And I thought…no one has seen my hair since the last time I “styled” my hair at home a few weeks after the pandemic started. Well, no one except my wife, and I don’t think she really noticed one way or the other.

I couldn’t really justify why I was spending so much time doing my own hair styling at home, so I made the decision – to heck with it, instead of styling it, let’s just get rid of it.

Mow It, Don’t Style It

So I broke out the old dog clippers, and started mowing.

Here’s what I ended up with.

After my hair styling at home experiment

How’s that for hair styling at home? Jealous?

Now there’s a lot of talk of “opening up” states, businesses, beaches and more, and here I am with nothing more than stubble on my head. That’s going to take a couple of months to grow out. Well, I guess it will get me through summer either way.

Personally, I suspect it’s probably too soon to be opening up again. But who knows? Maybe it will go all right. Then again if people start coughing up blood and dying, we’ll know it was too soon after all, won’t we?

Laundry Changes?

I noticed something else when I had to make a doctor’s appointment for a non-Covid issue. As I was getting ready to go to the appointment (with my mask), I put my blue jeans on. As I started to put them on I wondered if this pair should be relegated to the laundry. It occurred to me that I had not gotten a fresh pair of jeans out of my drawer in about six weeks. I was kind of grossed out at first, but then I realized I haven’t changed jeans in six weeks because I spend my days in shorts working from home and I haven’t gone anywhere in over six weeks. So the jeans that have been hanging on the door actually are still clean.

Well, I went ahead and swapped to a fresh pair just for the sake of it. It seemed right.

Before we go, I want to be clear that I realize haircuts and jeans are a trivial nothing compared to what some folks are facing. There are people, entire families, in the thousands, struggling to hang on and to keep a roof over their families’ heads, fighting to feed their loved ones. Other people have lost loved ones to this virus. More will almost certainly perish, struggling for breath at the end.

As you know we are all affected by the pandemic.

So I ask you to please help where you can and to donate if you can.

‘Til next time,

Dave Hodges on recliner

Dave

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