Bad Hair Day? Cut Your Losses

Wake up. Feel sharp. Look in mirror . . . and die.

There’s a two-inch frizz of a manhole in the middle of your hair. It won’t mousse or spray into place. It has a mind of its own.

Everyone else will notice it. And talk about it.

Your stomach hurts. Do you call in sick? Cancel your lunch date? Fire your hairdresser . . . ?

You are having a Bad Hair Day.

“Bad hair is like the ‘check-engine’ light going off in your car,” says San Francisco stylist Richard Denaro. “It’s a sign that tells you: Do Not Proceed. You should just go back to bed.”

If you do, you’ll be the most frivolous person on Earth.

But if you don’t, you could be courting disaster.

*

Since before the day Delilah came at Samson with the scissors, humankind has been preoccupied with the power of hair--to make us right, to win us love, to ruin our day. Rituals and rites through the ages have had us tie it, yank it or shave it, depending on whether we’re marrying or mourning.

Superstition dictates what time of day and year to cut it, and what will happen if we burn instead of bury it.

Some anthropologists argue its magical properties. Psychologists debate its symbolism.

“Hair,” says UC Berkeley folklorist Alan Dundes, “is a loaded topic.”

And therein lies the crux of the Bad Hair Day, that oddball, natural phenomenon that takes place when meteorology, biochemistry, psychology and astrology meet.

It starts with the hair itself--the recalcitrant bangs, the electromagnetic ducktail, the humorless cowlick, the jerry-built Jheri-Kurl, the fizzled left side, that one piece of crowning glory twanging out of step.

“It won’t stick up right, it won’t lie down right, it won’t sit there right,” says Janet Rae, a Contra Costa resident whose thin, “slightly permed, slightly streaked” baby-fine hair led her to choose UC Davis over San Francisco State so she could avoid four years of Bad Hair Days brought on by coastal fog.

Why does your hair hate you?

The reasons are as varied as hair itself. Maybe you slept on it wrong. Maybe the barometric pressure dropped. Stress or anger, even unrequited love, can rankle hair, stylists say.

There may be too many chemicals on your head, or too many in your body. Hairdressers talk about collective Bad-Hair-Day periods--such as the early 1980s, when cocaine use was fashionable and beautiful perms went flat within 24 hours, or Barbra Streisand’s “A Star Is Born” phase, which spawned a Bad Hair Year of naturally dying permanent waves.

Maybe it’s a sign of something deeper.

“It’s like being an adolescent again--the most vulnerable time in your life. You don’t want to go to school,” says Ronnie Caplane, an Oakland attorney whose wash-and-wear short hair is her personal bow to the power of Bad Hair Days. “You try everything--sleeping on tin-can rollers, shellacking it, ironing it, then you step into the Midwestern dryness and zooop, it looks lousy. You want to crawl under a rug.”

Here is where hair can exert power over psyche.

In your mind, the world is pointing. You are no longer a person of many parts, says “Situational Anxiety” author-psychologist Herbert Freudenberger: “You are a flaw.”

You’re walking around in a science-fiction novel, one step out of time. Then, bad things can happen.

“I attended this wedding as a friend of the groom’s,” says hair stylist Denaro. “The bride was a do-it-yourself type. She wanted to do her own hair. She wanted tendrils. They’re supposed to be those lovely Victorian wisps that fall delicately around the face. . . .”

The family posed for pictures on a Japanese bridge, he recalls. The homemade tendrils, now a lumpy helmet, fell over the bride’s eyes. The mother picked them up between shots. Mid-session, the bridge collapsed. The family ran to the house to wash off the gown. A “born-again” cousin tried to quell the hysteria by starting a prayer circle around the bride. Later that day, the first tier of the wedding cake dropped into the second. Within a year, the marriage was over.

Did the bad hair cause it all?

“I can’t really say,” says Denaro. “I just know that the bad energy started with the hair and carried on through the day.”

*

Bad energy is the key ingredient in the Bad-Hair-Day psychology. It’s sort of like what happens to highly superstitious people who walk under ladders on Friday the 13th. Or when their horoscopes tell them not to take a trip.

“It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy,” says USC psychologist Barbara Cadow. “Some people say, ‘Who cares if my hair looks lousy,’ and that’s the end of it. But the more sensitive person, the more intense person, can click into this idea, ‘My hair looks terrible! What else can go wrong?’ ”

Science has an explanation.

The fight-or-flight response takes over, which creates tension. Enough for you to lose your keys or lock them in your car. You get rattled. You drop things.

Then the mind kicks in again.

“The small mistakes, dropping the keys, writing the wrong date on the check, are really the rule, not the exception,” says Cadow. “But our society allows no room for mistakes. We’re supposed to be in control all the time.”

Which just adds to the tension. Which fuels the forgetfulness or the clumsiness. Which is why the California Driver’s Handbook (although it doesn’t mention bad hair by name) tells us to pull over to the side of the road if we’re upset.

The cure for Bad Hair Days is fairly simple, if you happen to be a mind-over-matter kind of person.

“I got off the plane into the New Orleans humidity, and I could literally feel my hair going broinggg , up in little frizzy ringlets,” says Marin resident Kathleen Lowenthal, whose congenitally curly hair has made her a lifelong scarf collector.