good-bye, my friend

Posted by beth on January 24, 2008

Five years ago for Christmas, my sister gave me my very first hair dryer. I know. How can a girl go 22 years without owning a hair dryer? Well just wrap your head around this one: I don’t own a brush or a comb. I used to. There was a time when no one in America put together that brushing curly hair causes it to become ENORMOUS. That’s why everyone in the 80′s and early 90′s looked like that. They all wanted perms, and they all used brushes. BAM…Whitesnake. ANYhoe, once the hair philosophy, “The Bigger, the Better” went out around ’94/’95, I gave up the brush and went to the wide-tooth comb. This, I used until I chopped all my hair off in the fall of ’99, at which point, I gave up all styling tools except for my own hands and a crap-load of gel.

Then, in 2002, having graduated from college and decided that wearing wet hair to work isn’t exactly the most professional look, my sister gave me a hair dryer. A Remington Vortex Ionic hair dryer, to be exact. It was a GREAT gift that year, and for five years it served me well, but lately, I noticed that it wasn’t doing so well. It was taking a long time to get not a lot of drying done, and this after about eight months of internal sparking and an occasional burning smell. So back in like April or May, I went ahead and purchased a new Conair Ceramic Quiet Styler (with finger diffuser for curly hair…cha-ching!). I wanted to hold out on using it, though, until the Remington was completely dead.

Well, this week, the Remington has been utterly worthless, so I decided to give the Conair a try-out this evening, and I was just blown away. It worked so well so quickly, and I’ve never been a fan of diffusers, but I think I just didn’t know how to use them properly. Thanks to Jill, though, that is no longer the case, and I am happy to report that I’ve just cut my hair-drying time down by about 90% (although you should know that, according to Will, approximately 45% of statistics are made up). Plus, I’m using about 2% less electricity by not running the hair dryer for a full fifteen minutes.

So Brooke and I said a few words and then had a moment of silence as I trashed the Remington. It will always hold a special place in my hair.