My friend Alysia is blessed with truly enviable genes—she's a lithe 5'8", 120 pounds, with long legs, a narrow rib cage, and swanlike neck. She also has beautiful, balanced features: a full mouth, large (but not googly) brown eyes, a patrician brow, and pale (but not pasty), wrinkle-free skin. She quite closely resembles a supermodel. In fact, it was only when I tried to figure out why, when she walks into a room, she hits the scene not as a bombshell (as her objective stats would suggest) but as an approachable, normal girl that I arrived at my ground-breaking socio-scientific theory. What stands between Alysia and instantly-sending-men-to-knees status? What makes her the hot librarian in the Hollywood stereotype before she whips off her glasses? One very small but significant detail: her hair.
Don't get me wrong; Alysia's mane is in line with the rest of her genetics—glossy chestnut with natural ringlets. But "it has this tendency to, how can I explain it?" she moans. "...Triangulate."
Every six months or so, Alysia, like many of us, decides she needs to update. She takes herself to Heart, a one-name hipster hair-dresser in New York City who works out of her Chelsea apartment and has given our way coolest friends their layered, insouciant sexpot manes. She does the same for Alysia. It lasts about four days.
One day I see her and she's intimidatingly chic, and the next day my dear, familiar Alysia is back, her shoulder-length hair like that of a 1950s mom in a television drama, a modified curly pageboy. I have to refrain from teasing her after each cycle, because I know it's the stringy-haired pot calling the curly-haired kettle black.
Alysia and I have the very same problem: We can't conquer our hair set point.
It's not you, it's not your too thin/too curly/too thick/too straight hair, it's not your lack of discipline (though those are factors)—you're fighting psychobiology: Human beings have a hair set point.
Most of you are probably aware of the weight set point. Biologists believe that bodies gravitate to a certain weight. It's why most diets fail. When you're 30 pounds over your set point, curb calories and your body easily sheds extra pounds. But when you near your set point, your body starts to cling to the weight, and your metabolism slows down. Some scientists say you can adjust your weight set point semipermanently, but that takes long-term discipline.
