Mall-Bangs By Aqua Net

Small rodents and curious sparrows could have easily become tragically impaled on the sky-high Aqua Net bangs that I proudly wore in the 80s…yes, they were that gravity-defying. The notoriously cheap extra hold hairspray that I favored, so alluring in its pastel aerosol container and oftentimes just 99 cents a can, was my main weapon of choice and (sadly) the precise brand that all of my bang-competing-peers bought up in mass quantities with their seemingly limitless allowances. I was of modest circumstances, and therefore the ongoing deficit of this most essential resource in my community would prompt me to raid the kitchen and cook up my own cockamamie sugar-water-hair-preparations, guaranteed to resist hurricane-force winds of up to 67 miles per hour. Despite keeping up with the Joneses, any self-respecting teen who had been around the mall a few times knew that Aqua Net brand aspirations were de rigueur – they were the golden standard to which all wall-‘o-bang-standards were held.

 In order to achieve such supremely-high styling heights, one had to become highly skilled in the art of back-combing, and for this very task, I turned to none other than my grandmother’s gnarly-looking, metal-tailed comb. Why it didn’t occur to me to scrub off the accumulated hair mouse and Dippity-do caked at the base of the teeth, I’ll never know, but it was quite sight to behold. I never quite mastered the foof-and-spray technique (despite hanging my head upside down, creating a voluminous thatch in my bangs, swinging back and forth, and spraying until the cows came home), so I learned to do the next best thing – cheat with my curling iron. To this day, that memory summons the distinctive burned-chemical-hair-scent that surely made common houseflies keel over and die in my path. Even when I swallowed, I could ‘taste’ the chemically goodness in my throat.

 Try to tell any teen female in the mid-eighties that her lacquered bangs (emulating that of a 9 foot tsunami wave and imprinted with barrel marks) were ‘less than attractive’ and she’d deliver the stink-eye, guaranteed to knock you out cold. I naturally thought that I looked phenomenal and so did all of my Aqua Net cohorts – in fact we were our own best fan clubs! That was the most amusing thing about this ludicrous beauty ritual.  We worked exceedingly hard to create a crown of crunchy tresses for the entire world to see, but if anyone dared to view our efforts from the side, back, or while standing on a chair above us, they would see an altogether different landscape. Everyone who was anyone didn’t bother to fuss with the back of their hair – I mean, what was the point? We weren’t in the habit of backing into a room, so if the rear view of our mane was somehow studded with knots and kinks, then so be it.  

 I recall my mother accusing me of not looking in the mirror because she reasoned that if I had, then there’s no way that I could have possibly left the house looking like a family of birds had nested on my head. She frequently cited rats and other dirty little creatures as habitual visitors, too, but I naturally dismissed her comments as the ramblings of an out-of-touch mother with no style whatsoever. One time, I actually did check out my profile from behind and in a moment of stability, I could actually see what she was referring to, but that moment quickly passed, never to return again. As I mentioned, stink-eyes were my specialty during that period in cultural history, and when she dared to claim that people could to surf through the rip curl lurking behind my bangs, I kicked the posturing into high gear.

 When I consider the polar opposite existence that my tresses enjoy in the year 2009 — hairspray free, baybeee! — my former self would have found such a notion absolutely incredulous. No hairdo security?  No insurance policy against humidity and acts of God?! Totally, like fer sure. Hairspray was an essential part of my youthful glory…it was the means by which hair halos achieved their lofty heights of splendor. From an older-but-wiser-standpoint, it boggles the mind to consider my personal role in the depletion of our ozone layer, as well as the health hazards that regular exposure to aerosol-propelled hairspray present to a developing adolescent, but such sobering thoughts would have never crossed my relatively empty mind back then. My love affair with synthetically-achieved voluminous bangs was far too strong to risk distraction, were I to actually engage my cerebral matter. Ignorance, they say, is bliss and I was certainly among the happily unencumbered.  The only thing that ever weighed me down was the Aqua Net build-up clinging to my roots.    

Tags: 80's, Aquanet, fashion, hair

This entry was posted on January 19th, 2009 and is filed under Memories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.