Havoc in the Hair : Weather: Holding spray is no match for the Santa Ana winds. A meteorologist fears flying toupees.

Pauline Minton was so worried about the winds that were rattling her house that she spent much of the morning with a bottle of heavy-duty hair spray before venturing outdoors.

In front of a Target store in Simi Valley, Sheila Farmer had to wrap a six-foot scarf around her head to keep the hair out of her eyes and mouth.

And at the Camarillo Springs Golf Course, Frank Garbarino had to keep pausing between practice swings to pat his silver hair back into place.

It was, to put it bluntly, a bad hair day in Ventura County.

Minton, Farmer and Garbarino were among the thousands of windblown, disheveled people who endured gusts up to 40 m.p.h. Monday, tangling tresses, ruining coiffures and even triggering a mild run on hair-spray supplies.

“The toupees are flying,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Terry Schaeffer. “You got to watch those hairpieces. I’m worried that they’ll fly off and get stuck on someone’s windshield and cause an accident.”

For those who have had nothing but bad hair days since the Santa Ana winds began blowing last week, Schaeffer offered some good news: Breezes are expected to die down this afternoon and hairstyles will be back to normal.

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“People get really upset,” said Hillary Schneider, a stylist at Trends 2000 in Thousand Oaks. “If you have a bad hair day, everything is wrong.”

Business has been brisk since the Santa Anas howled into Ventura County, she said. Portable hair spray bottles are sold out at her salon, and people have been asking for advice on how to get rid of static in their hair.

Schneider recommends using a deep conditioner, then a gel and then hair spray to anchor a hairdo.

“People are really picky. Hair has a lot to do with your self-image,” Schneider said. “It’s the first thing people notice about you.”

Michael Namm, a Ventura psychologist, said, “Hair is really emphasized in our culture. It’s one of the major aspects of how people are seen.”

Farmer, the woman who resorted to a six-foot scarf for protection, was soliciting donations in Simi Valley for the Salvation Army and said she really didn’t care if she was having a bad hair day.

“I used to be self-conscious about my hair,” said Farmer, 42. “Now I’m old, so I don’t care. You don’t like it, don’t look at it.”

Farmer forgot to bring a rubber band to tie back her brunette locks, and the wind whipped strands of it into her mouth. After eating her hair for about half an hour, she gave up and wrapped the purple scarf around her head.

Minton, a Simi Valley housewife, said she gets irritable whenever her short, strawberry-blond hair doesn’t look nice.

“I didn’t want to leave the house,” said Minton, who braved blustery winds after shoving combs, bobby pins and a ton of hair spray in her hair. When she was done, the strongest gale wasn’t able to lift a strand on her head.

Garbarino, the Camarillo golfer, said he only uses hair tonic, which proved to be a poor defense against the wind Monday as he practiced his swings. The breezes ruffled his short, silver hair, and he had to continually stop to straighten it.

“I generally wear a golf cap, but today I didn’t because I figured it would have blown straight off,” he said.

Daniel Milla, a 31-year-old pharmaceutical salesman from Ventura, hid out from the winds briefly in his car during a lunch break in Grant Park.

“When you’re in sales, you got to look good, so you feel good, so you can make the customer feel good too,” he said.

Milla said he doesn’t have too many bad hair days now because he keeps his cropped short.

“It’s more of a concern of losing it,” he said, pointing to his receding hairline. “If I had a head full of hair, I wouldn’t care how messy it was.”