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Crown and Glory
On beauty, strength, and my mother’s signature silver locks
“Hair is a woman’s crown and glory,” my mother told me on more than one occasion as she stood in her bathroom, brushing her hair. First, she would push all of her silver locks in front of her face, then she’d take a Denman brush (always a Denman brush) from the back of her neck to the ends of her hair and then throw the whole mess back in the direction from which it came. After that, she’d pile it all on top of her head in a fluffy, chrome whipped cream swirl of hair. Then she’d take her hands and pull on stray chunks of hair until they fell as she wanted them to, taking extra care to get the right amount of fluff from her bangs.
Though most of my life my mother’s hair was silver, she was born a dark brunette like I was. There were pictures of her as a child on the mantle in our house, a little brown bob at six, a bouffant at 16, and a teased updo in her early twenties. In the 1970s, when she and everyone else wanted to look like Farrah Fawcett, my mother began frosting her hair, bleaching the brown out of it for a more golden shade. In my favorite photograph of her from the time, she is holding her trusty Canon AE-1 camera, curving waves of lightened hair framing her bright eyes and white teeth.
