My great aunt (a stunning beauty…and relative most likely to be issued a warning for public mischief) likes to tell the story of how she went on her first date with my uncle. With curlers in her hair.

She went out in public…on a date…with the man who would later pledge his undying love to her. Wielding a head full of velcro rollers.

That was 1954. And things haven’t changed much. In Texas, big hair is never too big. And whatever sins you commit on the path to bigness are absolved.

For every minute a woman (Texan or otherwise) spends thinking about her tresses, she spends another minute thinking about how to groom or completely annihilate hair on the rest of her body. There’s an unspoken pact made among women: “If I start to grow a mustache, stage an intervention. And bring tweezers.”

And so begins the longest love/hate relationship a woman will have in her lifetime.

Here is just a sampling of what I, myself, have entertained in the quest for follicular perfection:

• Color – Perhaps the trickiest of all hair processes. It turns out, the color of “Your 2nd Grade School Photo” doesn’t come in a bottle.
• Highlights
• Lowlights
• A few very unfortunate perms
• Toners
• Caviar deep conditioning (Probably not made with caviar)
• Falsies (the eyelash variety)
• Lash Dyeing
• Lash Perming (Yes, it exists)
• Laser Hair Removal (***Involves goggles and a medical-grade blowtorch)
• Threading
• Tweezing
• And paying someone to rip my hair out by the roots. I mean, waxing.

And besides waxing sentimental about old hair memories, there are things I’d like to know.

Mysterious things.

Like how to French braid the back of my head without a prehensile tail. What’s the worst crime my hairstylist has ever committed? And is someone going to grow a third eye….or is it safe for me to start slathering on the Latisse?

This is HAIR LIP.