You can go from looking old and haggard to young and vibrant in a matter of hours. All this immediately tells someone glaring signs what is important to you. Your hair. If it is messy, you don’t care about it, if it has extensions or feathers or a lot of dye, you care way too much. And for men, whether you have hair or no hair, well , bald is an easy style to put the focus on you.

Scientists aren’t even sure why we have hair on our heads. Everyone wants it longer, shorter, straighter, curlier, thicker or smoother. All this keeps the nation’s 350,000 hairdressers busy . For most people, hair is the one accessory you can’t take off. When someone has a hairstyle that is spectacular, it can be life changing.

Hair is big business at the International Beauty Show in Las Vegas. It is almost like the diaper business. Babies poop and you will always need a diaper. People shave and will always need a razor so,with hair , hairdressors will always be in demand. Even in a bad economy, people will open their wallets for a haircut. Go to a salon, and within 2 hours you can completely change your identity and therefore how others percieve you.

Look the actress Sigorney Weaver. She has had more hairstyles in her movies than anyone from curly and long in Ghostbusters to being bald in Alien III. Some other famous women who were known for their great hair were Veronica Lake beautiful long wavy blond hair, Diana Ross with her giant Afro and Jennifer Aniston with her styled frosted hair.

Thirty five years ago there was the feathered shag style made famous by Farrah Fawcett. Today it is all about the accents. They are putting in real feathers, hair extensions, wigs sewn into your hair that accents your image and gives you that cha cha you need to look and feel hot. Long before Snookies poof there were poofs in France popularized by Marie Antoinette. Her pouf was political.

In the 17^th century they did not have synrthetic gel, they used lard in their hair to style and give it some body, and fighting off vermine was a problem then. And with the high styles, often the hair would be caught on fire by the candels that were every where for lighting purposes. Hair is just significant in so many ways and we see it immediately.

There are generalities. Long straight hair says, professional, competent, solid , predictable and interesting according to Yale psychologist, Maryann La France who has studied how our hair affects how others percieve us. The study put 5 different hair styles on the photo of one woman. Depending on the hairstyle at the time on the face, people had dramatically different views of the person in terms of how wealthy they were, how smart they were, how open-minded and how agreeable they were.

Women without hair were seen as the most intelligent. I don’t know, that tells me Cancer patient. So, hair for women must suggest some aspect of feminity. Once you talk about feminity, the IQ expectations of the girl goes way down. Hey, I didn’t say it the Yale lady with very short hair said it!

Women with long straight blond hair were the most narrowminded. And the most favored color was blond whether it was Marilyn Monroe or the fake blond of Jean Harlow. I think because it is hard to find a real natural blond. The old statements are true. Blonds have more fun, redheads are feisty, brunettes are sexy I know, my little brunette is sexy.

What ever your hair type or color, it is really possible to have a bad hair day. In the Oxford English Dictionary the defination of a bad hair day lists 2 definitions. First is, a day in which things are not going well. The philosophy is that when things ARE going well, then there is nothing you can’t do. So, that is the lift you can get from a good hair day.

It is no different for men except bad hair days for men just make them look stupid. It is that lift, that boost of confidence that some people like Sigorney Weaver want to give to women. The non-profit Dress For Success program offered unemployed women free hair cuts and makeup sessions and photos for their resumes. You can even feel more articulate with your hair done. The fact is that the average human head contains 100,000 hairs so fix that messy hair already!