Drybar Is My Nemesis

No, I don’t feel empowered by sparkly gold blow dryers masquerading as self-care

Photo: Monica Schipper/Getty Images

I heard a statistic once that said men think about sex every seven seconds. This seemed absurd to the point of unbelievability — until I realized that I think about my hair exactly that often. In fact, I think about my hair more than anything else in my life. If I know you — even if I like you, even if I love you — I probably think about my hair more than you.

In a podcast interview with Marc Maron, pop research psychologist Brene Brown discussed shame and listed examples of what people think of when they think about vulnerability. The list included a first date after a divorce, trying to get pregnant after miscarriage, and saying I love you for the first time. All I could think about was leaving the house with my natural hair.

I have curly hair, with tight spirals somewhere between a 3b and 3c (for the other curly heads out there). Curly hair is like a troublesome toddler; it can be cute on a good day but you never quite know what it’s up to. My hair is also very dry and very coarse, like tiny wires made of thread. But more troubling than the curls or the texture is that my hair is very thin and there is very little of it. The amount of hair on my head is probably the same as the bangs on most women I see walking the streets.

Curly hair is like a troublesome toddler; it can be cute on a good day but you never quite know what it’s up to.

For a long time, I worked very hard on my hair. In my twenties, I spent hundreds of dollars multiple times per year on keratin treatments and chemical processing to make my hair smooth and straight (in addition to hundreds of dollars on haircuts, highlights, and you-name-it products). I can easily spot these treatments on other women; when a minor celebrity gains popularity, for example, you can be sure that a few months later, her hair will be suspiciously smooth. But the treatments made me look like a wet dog; they simply exposed how thin my hair was and continued to damage the hair I had left.

So I retreated to my own devices, specifically an ionized hair dryer, a hair straightener, and a curling iron. My bathroom on any given day looked like a machine shop. At least a dozen products sat on the shelf; I mixed and matched them like a chemist depending on the season, temperature, and moisture in the air. I would spend up to an hour in front of the mirror puffing my hair out for volume to hide the thinness, then patting it down, swirling the curls together to eliminate frizz, then puffing it again until I got so frustrated I’d drench it with water just to see it smooth for a few moments before starting all over again.

I’m not a particularly vain person. My goal was never to look glamorous; even “put together” (by popular standards) has always felt like a reach. I was simply trying to look acceptable. I’ve spent an extraordinary amount of effort getting my hair to look how most people’s hair looks when they’ve put in no effort at all. Haircuts, for me, are like going into surgery. Every strand is precious, so each snip has the potential to throw my head off kilter. One bold hairdresser recently decided to cut me a side bang. The fear of how this side bang might curl, too short to tuck behind my ears, kept me awake for weeks. This side bang may very well have taken years off my life.

I wish I could say I had an aha moment when I got older and wiser, and stopped caring about my hair. It’s true that the older I get, the less I care. Now that I’m in my late thirties, I’ve given up on the straightening. I mostly let it do its thing. But that’s just because I prioritize my time and have better things to do, not because I feel great about it.

This lifetime of insecurity isn’t entirely of my own creation, nor is it as simple as internalizing the smooth waves of popular media. I’ve had many men, complete strangers and close, progressive friends, tell me that they’re only attracted to women with certain kinds of hair: long locks, thick waves, and shaggy bangs. They state it so plainly with no sense of superficiality, as if this preference is similar to liking someone’s personal style or taste in music, as if I choose not to have a long, layered rock-star look. In some sense, I get it; we all have our preferences. But to deny how deeply pop culture shapes what we consider beautiful, to inherit these tastes without question and chalk it up to instinct alone, is ignorant if not irresponsible.

It’s impossible to talk about hair without talking about race. The idea that smooth hair as beautiful is rooted entirely in whiteness. Black women have a long and complicated history with the cultural acceptance of their hair, manifesting itself in all aspects of life, including the workplace. I am white and I won’t pretend to understand the layers of complexity that black women face when it comes to our culture’s standards of beauty. But although we all certainly feel hair pressure to varying degrees and our experiences are vast and incomparable in many ways, on some basic level the pressure many women feel to look a certain way is universal.

This pressure pushes on us so constantly and so naturally that we can’t help but push it back on to each other. I’ve had many women ask me (with the best of intentions) if I have ever tried using products. These conversations generally happen at a party or event where, on average, I will have at least half a dozen products in my hair and a few in my bag, just in case. I assure these women between clenched teeth that yes, I have tried products. But in the past few years, their suggestions have shifted to a new solution: Drybar.

In 2010, Drybar was founded by an enterprising mother of two who claims to have curly hair, although you’d never know it. For those of you who live in a hole, have blissfully perfect hair, or are men, Drybar is a chain of salons where women go to get their hair professionally blow dried for $40. No, not cut; just blow-dried. Many women stop at Drybar multiple times each week before work. (They offer memberships.) They even serve champagne. I hear it’s an all-around a very pleasant experience.

But I have never been to Drybar. In fact, Drybar is my nemesis.

Drybar represents everything I desperately want to not want. Drybar is 37 years of progress, however slow, towards self-acceptance, all squandered by a sparkly, gold, blow dryer disguised as self-care. Drybar is the next level of expectation setting for a new generation of women who will feel even more pressure to straighten their hair because there will be Drybars on every corner.

While feminism has made a welcomed comeback in the past few years, consumer feminism has leached on to that progress, feeding off of it and killing it at once. The beauty industry has always been problematic but the recent masking of beauty spending as “empowering” is simply regressive. We see traces of this all around us (Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign and Gwenyth Paltrow’s GOOP, to start), with businesses profiting off of critiques of the beauty industry while still pushing beauty products on their readers. Amanda Hess pinpointed this latest trick in corporatized feminism, in which beauty and self-care are dangerously intertwined: “Beauty standard denialism,” she wrote in a brilliant review of Amy Schumer’s movie, I Feel Pretty, encourages “women to engage in beauty and fitness routines to become better people, not more attractive ones.” She continued: “Keeping up appearances is no longer simply a superficial pursuit; it’s an ethical one, too. A woman who fails to conform to the ideal is regarded as a failure as a person.”

Drybar is not helping us feel beautiful, it is reinforcing dated standards of (white) beauty.

Drybar falls squarely in this paradigm. Their messages are steeped in the idea that beauty is almost besides the point; what they’re selling is confidence. In their “Heart & Soul” video, in which they explain their core values, Drybar espouses statements like “Be yourself,” “Nothing is sexier than honesty and humility,” and “It’s not just blowouts… it’s confidence.” The irony is that these statements are coming from a brand that, above all else, wants to change a fundamental part of their customers; it’s laughable. Drybar is not helping us feel beautiful, it is reinforcing dated standards of (white) beauty, making most women feel incredibly not beautiful… unless you pay Drybar all your disposable income, of course.

The sad truth is, I will feel better if I blow out my hair. I will be taken more seriously at work. I’ll get more swipes on Tinder. I get why Drybar is so popular but I know I’m not paying for strength and confidence; instead, I’m paying for a Band-Aid, a cover-up. Spending $120 a week to keep my hair straight is not proof of loving myself, it is proof of hating myself and I refuse to take all the blame for that self-hatred. If women were truly valued for their confidence and if a woman’s attractiveness were really rooted in her strength, Drybar would be obsolete. Instead, society’s regard for women is somehow still inextricably tied to how well we adhere to a certain standard of beauty. And that’s what has to change — not our hair.

My secret, the thing I spend too much time each day hiding, is that despite working hard to build a self and a life that I’m for the most part proud of, my hair still tints that pride with shame. It is the thing lacing each of my thoughts, telling me that something is wrong with me. And the thing about Drybar is that it knows this. Drybar sees it clear as day; it understands my secret and it gets me. But Drybar is not trying to lessen my shame. Rather, it feeds off this shame. This shame lies in so many women and the more this standard of beauty is perpetuated, the more Drybar’s empire grows. My shame is what their gold hairdryers and champagne toasts are made of.