Good hair, bad hair

Joe knows the wail well, and dreads it. It is the wail of a woman having a bad hair day.

The wail rises to a crescendo and finally, amid mutters about the merits of wearing a hijab, collapses in a heap of despair.

"But your hair looks good to me," Joe says, grateful that the wailing has stopped but genuinely confused as to why it occurred in the first place, and concerned about the hijab comments.

"It always looks good to you," I moan.

Yes, we women want our men to always like how we look. But if they can't tell when our hair is a total catastrophe, it makes us suspicious as to whether they can truly appreciate it when it looks awesome.

"Someone needs to write a book for men showing pictures of 'good hair' and 'bad hair,' " Joe says impatiently, "because I sure can't tell the difference."

It is a great idea, if men could stay awake long enough to get through all the technicalities. As any woman knows, there can be subtle nuances that differentiate 'good hair' from 'bad hair' that would probably, even in picture form with little arrows and explanations, be lost on a gender that can take days, weeks even, to notice a slight change in one's hairstyle, such as that one is now blonde where one has always been a brunette.

One cannot necessarily differentiate bad hair from good hair by whether it has been styled by the individual herself or by a hair professional. In the book Joe is proposing, a picture of hair styled by an average, ordinary woman and the picture of the same hair styled by a talented hair professional for $400 per hair follicle may be the very same picture. In some cases these two photos may be followed by a third, which would reflect the woman having gone home after paying this small ransom to have her hair done, frantically undoing everything the stylist did, redoing it her own way, and ending up with exactly the same hair.

Browsing in a bookstore recently, I picked up a book about clothing styles. It had lots of pictures of the two authors, modeling what one should and shouldn't wear when one has certain unfortunate body imperfections.

"Look!" I said to Joe. I stabbed my finger at a picture in the book. "Look at her hair! I want that hair. I gotta show this to my stylist."

He looked closely at the picture. "So that's good hair?" he asked.

"That," I said, "is excellent hair."