My Long and Short Hair Care

I’ve always had long hair. Until 52, that is, when I got tired of it and cut it, first in half to my waist and then even shorter, above the shoulder line. I'm 55 now and still enjoy it short although sometimes I look at my old pictures with long hair and sigh deeply.

Every woman in my family had very long hair. My grandmother could wrap her beautiful thick braid around her head two times (that was the fashion in the 1940-50s). She went for a boyish short haircut when she was about 50. I guess she also got tired of it.

My grandmother’s sister wore her hair long well into her 70s. Both my grandmother and great aunt had “Cossack” hair – thick and wavy, an envy of many women. I still remember when we went to the village for the summer and had to take baths with my grandmother and great aunt, it would take her a lot of time and multiple changes of water in a large basin to wash her hair properly. It always smelled like egg yolk and honey because that’s what she washed it with after the first round of badly smelling Soviet shampoo.

My great aunt’s daughter who was taking care of her hair as she got older finally talked her into cutting it short when my great aunt was 75 (she lived to 94). For the first month or so, my great aunt would phantom feel out her crown where her wrapped braid used to be, as if surprised it was not there anymore. When asked how she felt about cutting it, she’d respond with a smile, “Much lighter.” But she always felt nostalgic for it.

My mother had very long thick hair until she was 19. Then she left her small village for a vocational school in the city and one day her dormmates cut her braid off at the root while she was sleeping at night. She had to shave it off in the back for it to look even. Or at least that was the story she told my grandmother to avoid scolding and nagging. Young women experiment with their looks when they escape their conservative rural environment for the city freedom. My mom wouldn’t ever confess, though, that she’d cut her hair on purpose. So I take her story at its face value.

My younger sister has undoubtedly the thickest and richest hair in the family. She had it long until she finished high school. And ever since then, she wears it super short and experiments with lots of different hair styles.

When I was 17, before I went to Kyiv to study at the university, my hair was so long it reached my knees. It was also very thick and full but completely straight, like a wire. I was usually wearing it in one braid that was as thick as my fist. In Kyiv, after I made a stupid secret trip to Pripyat (a town adjacent to Chernobyl nuclear power plant), I started to shed my hair like an undernourished dog. I would brush it and the brush would be full of fallen hair. Not a pleasant sight when it’s super long, too. So when I dropped out because of bad migraines and returned home, my mother went into the emergency mode of saving my hair. She cut it to the waist line and started to apply the restorative hair mask that worked its magic. My hair stank like onions, and I had to wear a hat because of it but it did help. It took a couple of months for the hair to stop shedding and start restoring itself.

Here’s the recipe for the magic mask that women in my family used for generations to restore hair, especially in the spring, when it becomes fragile and falls out more due to lack of vitamins in the body:

1) Take a medium onion, chop into large pieces, and squeeze the juice out of it (before juicers, we used the simple garlic presser to do it)

2) Separate yolk of two eggs from the whites and add the yolks to onion juice.

3) Add a tablespoon of high-quality honey. Mix everything together well until it becomes uniform in consistency.

4) Put the mask all over your hair roots. It will be runny, so use something like a tight shower cap to keep it in place.

5) Wrap a towel around your head or put a warm hat on to create the greenhouse effect. Keep it on for at least 45 min (I usually go as long as a couple of hours) and wash off with warm water.

6) Do not use any shampoo. The yolk in the mixture will do the cleaning. Use the shampoo only a couple of days later if you can’t stand the smell.

This mask is the most potent for hair restoration. Years later I started to use coconut oil and avocado oil (one tablespoon of each) instead of the onion juice and it seemed to have pretty much the same effect, just not as strong.

I live in Tbilisi now where coconut and avocado oils are hard to find and pricey. So I started to use aloe juice by taking off the skin from aloe leaves and blending the core before adding yolk and honey. It makes quite a pleasant mask with good effects for my post-menopausal hair. I use it once a week. I also started to wear a satin cap at night to prevent hair foliage and it works well as well, or at least psychologically.

My final piece of advice for anyone who cares about their hair: Never brush it wet. Wet hair is most vulnerable and stretches almost two times of its normal length. If it got tangled while you washed it, you will pull out a lot of it while brushing wet. Let it dry naturally and brush and style it only when it’s at least half-wet.

Hope this helps and wish you happy hair days, into perpetuity.