{"id":23745,"date":"2018-03-29T11:30:03","date_gmt":"2018-03-29T10:30:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.journals.cambridge.org\/?p=23745"},"modified":"2018-03-29T11:15:19","modified_gmt":"2018-03-29T10:15:19","slug":"i-may-be-getting-my-hair-done-but-i-dont-care-too-much-how-it-looks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/2018\/03\/29\/i-may-be-getting-my-hair-done-but-i-dont-care-too-much-how-it-looks\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cI may be getting my hair done but I don\u2019t care too much how it looks\u201d: Treading the path between displays of over- and under-investment in appearance."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Dr Rachel Heinrichsmeier from King\u2019s College London reports on a practice used by older women in her research in a hair-salon.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the western world, we live in an environment where women are still expected to attend to their appearance. This expectation doesn\u2019t change as we age, just the emphasis, as we\u2019re urged left, right and centre to manage the look of age with a whole array of \u2018anti-ageing\u2019 products. But older women face a dilemma: on the one hand, we can\u2019t \u2018let ourselves go\u2019. The penalties for doing so range from disapprobation to increasing invisibility. But we can\u2019t either be seen to invest too much time, money or effort in our looks. This could seem vain.<\/p>\n

So how can we invest effort in how we look but still seem as if we\u2019re not all that interested? And how can we do this precisely at the point when we\u2019re sitting there in a hair-salon spending quite a lot of time and money on our appearance?<\/p>\n

Older women managing appearance in a small village salon<\/h2>\n

I explored this by looking at what the mostly older clients of a small village hair-salon did. Small, bright and clean, this wasn\u2019t a site of frills and femininity, but it exuded friendliness and frequently lively fun. A large number of the women came in for a weekly shampoo-and-set, and the bank of old-fashioned hood-dryers was one of the first things you saw on entering the salon. But a range of styling options was on offer, including of course cut and blow-dries and various kinds of colour treatment. I spent nearly two years hanging out in this salon, observing the clients and their appointments and audio-recording the kinds of talk that went on.<\/p>\n

One thing I noticed was what seemed to be an inconsistency between the way the older women dressed \u2013 as if appearance mattered to them \u2013, and the way they often talked \u2013 as if it didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

What they did: \u2018I\u2019m not letting myself go\u2019<\/h2>\n

So in terms of what they did<\/em>, most of my participants seemed to invest both time and effort in their appearance. They attended the hair-salon regularly and quite frequently, and they also mostly dressed quite presentably for it. This interest was actually also shown verbally<\/em> during occasional long consultation talks and remarks that revealed they were closely monitoring what the stylist was doing. They might break off from a story, for example, to make a comment. In all this, my participants displayed themselves as women who weren\u2019t \u2018letting themselves go\u2019. And of course they were in fact self-evidently taking care of their appearance, simply by being there in the hair-salon.<\/p>\n

Much of what they said: \u2018I\u2019m not vain\u2019<\/h2>\n

But when it came to the end of the appointment, when the stylist showed them the back of the head in the mirror, then it was another <\/em>story\u2026 quite often literally. At this point, as my audio-recordings showed, participants often didn\u2019t do more than nod or produce an in-passing sotto-voce<\/em> monosyllabic \u2018thanks\u2019 before continuing with whatever story they were telling. Basically, they constructed their story-telling as more important right now<\/em> than what they were ostensibly there for, their hair. In one extreme case, a client who had just spent over an hour having her hair cut and coloured made no verbal approval at all, instead overtly displaying lack of interest:<\/p>\n

\u201cShe didn\u2019t really want to see the back at all,\u201d said the stylist to her colleague.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d responded the client, \u201cso long as there\u2019s hair there still\u201d.<\/p>\n

Interested or uninterested in appearance?<\/h2>\n

So were these women invested in their appearance? Or didn\u2019t they actually care? The answer really is \u2018both\u2019. Looking after our appearance is a deeply ingrained habit in many women\u2019s lives. And with age come added pressures. But at the same time, there\u2019s this nagging sense that we shouldn\u2019t (look as if we) care too much (or for the \u2018wrong\u2019 reasons). Having to scrutinise our appearance in the mirror at the end of the appointment makes \u2018caring\u2019 seem rather salient.<\/p>\n

So for my participants, these small verbal manoeuvres were ways of managing both these constraints. There they were in the salon and so showing some interest in their appearance; but when it came to the stage of the hair-appointment when they were called upon to focus on their looks in the mirror and show an interest verbally<\/em>, they instead displayed themselves as \u201creally\u201d uninterested.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s often said, \u2018the devil\u2019s in the detail\u2019. And this is really so when it comes to seeing how older women negotiate conflicting ideas of how they should manage their appearance. When we look at these fine-grained details of everyday talk in this everyday place, we see just how \u2013 low-key, subtly and cannily \u2013 older women may manage to avoid seeming vain whilst simultaneously doing work to ensure they\u2019re not \u2018letting themselves go\u2019.<\/p>\n

Further information<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2018So long as there\u2019s hair there still\u2019: displaying lack of interest as a practice for negotiating social norms of appearance for older women<\/em><\/a> is a research paper by Rachel Heinrichsmeier of King\u2019s College London. It is published in the journal \u2018Ageing & Society\u2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr Rachel Heinrichsmeier from King\u2019s College London reports on a practice used by older women in her research in a hair-salon. In the western world, we live in an environment where women are still expected to attend to their appearance. This expectation doesn\u2019t change as we age, just the emphasis, as we\u2019re urged left, right […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":579,"featured_media":23747,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,122],"tags":[1319,4340,565,4341,4342],"coauthors":[4343],"class_list":["post-23745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-sciences","category-social-studies","tag-ageing","tag-ageing-society","tag-gender","tag-gerontology","tag-physical-appearance"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/579"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23745\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23745"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=23745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}