Published: October 17, 2008 10:05 pm      

Beauty tips for those who should know better

EDMOND — Remember Dippity-do? For the uninitiated, that’s the gel some of us once combed through our hair before rolling our locks around fruit juice cans. Prior to that, we used Jell-O from the kitchen cabinet to stiffen our curls. Disgusting? Yes, and there’s more.

It’s confession time, ladies. Now be honest. Was there not a time in your life when you let a Ladies Home Journal beauty column talk you into slathering Crisco on your body before lying out in the backyard sun?

I was old enough to know better when I did that. The Hollywood tan I’d been promised never happened. It wasn’t long before my entire person and the quilt I was lying on were covered in little black ants. I slipped and slid my way into the house screaming for my husband to turn the shower on, high and hot.

That same magazine came close to maiming me when I rubbed clumps of mayonnaise into my scalp on the strength of the promise that the treatment would revitalize my hair. I came to call that one the Helen Keller treatment.

The plan was to wind Saran Wrap around your gooey head and then blast away with a hairdryer, so that’s what I did. The air became heavy with the odor of deviled eggs left too long in the picnic hamper, and rivulets of mayonnaise found their way into every orifice of my face with blinding and deafening results.

Remember the Toni home perm? You can’t get that kind of kink at a salon, but who’d want to? You’d sue your hair stylist if she did that to you, but friends hired baby sitters and permed each others’ hair on a regular basis back in the day. Phew! You had to get the kids out of the house to preserve their lungs.

I bleached my hair only once, but I was thorough. It was awful. I’d soaked it in peroxide and set the timer when the storm siren went off. Two hours later I came up out of the cellar with straw on my head and a greater respect for the professionals. One of them gave me a poodle cut in exchange for my promise to never do that again. I wouldn’t have anyway, but I thought the cut was kinda cute.

Where I come from, they display photo panels of past graduating classes in the halls of the high school, and I do mean past. Some of those panels go all the way back to the ‘30s.

Picture a mini-skirted, bee-hived coed in front of those panels with her long-haired, side-burned male counterpart poking fun at the old fogy styles. Then leap ahead 20 years and picture a stringy and/or spike-haired unisex couple standing there poking fun at photos of the fun-pokers of two decades earlier.

What goes around comes around, and that brings us to “the rat” — any one of an assortment of foundations pressed against the scalp, over which one wraps, twists or drapes portions of hair.

Mother made her own rat. It was a brown fabric halo sort of thing which she pulled down around the crown of her head, then tucked her hair up and over till the rat was completely covered.

I loved watching her do that. In fact I did it myself when my time came, but my rat was plastic. It resembled an airy pot scrubber, but bigger. Remember Schultzy on “The Bob Cummings Show”? That’s how I looked. Check it out on the panel hanging in my hometown high school hall.

Laugh if you will, but cautiously. Paybacks are coming.

Marjorie Anderson is an Edmond resident.