These days we can find impressive dresses and expensive-looking handbags on the high street. No, what looks most out of reach is the one thing most of us have but don't know what to do with: hair.
Blow-drying may be having a second wind, but for years it has been out in the cold. After the big-hair boom of the 1980s, the death knell sounded for blow-drying when there came the two-in-one shampoos. They were the anti-thesis of blow-drying. They ushered in a new laissez-faire era of hair care, no aching arms required. The arrival of grunge advanced this idea further. Then in November 1993 Vogue proclaimed the return of glamour, and with it came Linda Evangelista, hair slicked to the scalp in sticky submission. Styling was on the way back, but at first texture rather than volume was the focus. It was not until 1995 that blow-drying really returned to the mainstream
Blow-drying requires the application of product, straighteners and patience. As such it marked the beginning of a move towards straightening hair. Soon swathes of women were straightening religiously before the mirror every morning, aided and abetted by technical advances. Ceramic straighteners replaced the old metal-plated ones, and got much hotter, rewarding those who persisted with properly straight hair rather than the wiry triangular mops created by their predecessors. But more than anything, straighteners gave previously straggly hordes a route back into grooming. Since then, hair has moved on, in tandem with fashion, towards a more sophisticated, dressed look.
On the journey back to blow-drying, hair has undergone an intensive commercialisation. For every twist and turn through texture to sleekly straight and now volume, a new array of potions has been devised and dispatched to the chemist's shelf.
Of course, what we are really leaving the salon with is a fantastic, though sadly transient, version of what we had before we submitted to the enchantment of the hairdresser's chair. This is, after all, a place of transformation. Under the blast of the dryer's nozzle, hair seems to transmute. All the paraphernalia of the salon is geared towards conferring this change in state. What is it, exactly, that we are paying for? "That's the best bit," says Gary Hooker of the hair spa. "When you blow-dry someone's hair, you've given them the hair they don't really believe they've got".
The Guardian
*Don't blow dry when your hair's too wet. Zoe Irwin at Headmasters recommends rough drying to about 80 per cent (50 per cent if you're trying to tame unruly curls) first. Otherwise, all you'll have to show for it is aching arms.
*Use products before you start. Start at the back or you'll                disturb the front as you move round your head.
* Pay equal attention to roots and ends. Lift hair from the roots with the brush. When winding hair round the brush up to the root, aim the nozzle on the underside of the brush as well as the top.