April 4, 2006--Bottle Blondes

My wife and I recently meet with a financial planner to see if we had enough money saved to scale back our work schedule and not wind up having to eat cat food twenty years from now.

It was quiet an unnerving experience since it included an unvarnished look at how we spend our money—he needed to know how much we really spent so as to make accurate projections. It was time to tell the truth.

The process included filling out a very lengthy form on which we were required to list how much it costs to run our apartment, how much we spend on vacations, on clothing, on food (including eating out--our single highest annual expense), medical insurance, transportation, etc.

It was such a specific and detailed list that it even included how much we spend on our hair! I laughed at this one since, as you can see from the photo on the right, I have much more hair on my chin than my head. So I put down $100 a year for me. Rona has beautiful, luxurious hair but it is all quite natural and requires only occasional cuts. So she put down $500.

We were very amused by all of this until reading a NY Times article (see it linked below) about the culture and cost of being blonde in New York City. It is clear that we would have had to significantly raise our annual estimate if either of us were to become a Bottle Blonde. To illustrate, twenty-six year old Mary Castellano, who works at a PR firm and lives in a tiny one-bedroom apartment, spends upwards of $500 a month, $6,000 per year for highlights and touchups. I see cat food in her future.

Creating and maintaining blondes is a booming component of the Hair Industry. In part because blondes are literally an endangered species, like the Snail Darter. Human evolution is naturally selecting fewer and fewer natural blondes for reproduction. Pale, Caucasian skin and blonde hair were essential to human survival in northern latitudes because, with so little available sunlight, lighter skin and hair were necessary for the absorption of life-sustaining Vitamin D. Since this is no longer true, to get enough sunlight in the winter all Swedes need to do is head off for St. Barts, blondes are heading toward extinction.

But not in New York.

And then there is the poetry of blonde hair, also life-sustaining. See this from the Times piece:

Delicate ribbons of flax are intertwined with streaks of vanilla and threads of gold strategically placed over a honey-toned base to create a silky, shiny, better-than-natural-looking head of hair . . . .

Like the icon of blondness, the late Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s, this is hair to worship.

I should add that our financial planner came to conclude, based on our projections, that if Rona stays natural and we both die no later than at 97, minimally, if we need to eat cat food, it will be the wet and not the dry version.