I think every family should have a member that can style hair. Imagine how happy women all across America would be if they had someone at home who knew how to blow dry their hair, especially from the back.

All the money we’d save!

I have never mastered the art of styling my own. I’m horrible at it. It doesn’t matter how many haircuts I’ve had and how many times I’ve watched one stylist or another blow dry my hair. I walk out of that salon and I will never look that way again. My new hairdo is a done deal by the time I wake up the next morning.

This is why they invented hair bands: the morning after a great haircut you can just put your hair in a pony tail and call it a day after wrangling your hair dryer like a cowboy with a rope.

If you know how to style your own hair, here’s what the world hasn’t said to you: congratulations. You’re awesome. You can do something many women cannot do.

I now understand why so many of our gender spend the time and money to go to a hairdresser every week to get their hair styled. They walk out that salon door every Saturday hoping it doesn’t rain or that a tornado won’t happen by. They just want to keep those hairs in place so they don’t have to style it themselves for seven whole delightful days.

And it’s cheaper than a therapist.

A conservative member of my family once went in to get a haircut and came out looking like she’d been singing in a punk rock band for a couple of years. I don’t know what the hairdresser was thinking when this middle aged woman came in after work wearing a business suit. What made her think spiked hair was the answer to this woman’s prayers?

For an entire six months, this family member had to wear a wig– the solution we came up with only after she locked herself in the bathroom for a week and said she wouldn’t come out until her hair grew back.

The thing is though, we learned something about wigs from this experience. People who wear wigs can just get up everyday and throw on that wig and go!

Don’t think it hasn’t crossed my mind.

Who reading this column is not sick of their hair? The time we spend washing it, drying it, styling it, cutting it, dyeing it, brushing it. We spend the equivalent of nine work weeks on our hair each year and I for one am tired of the maintenance.

In fact, the older women get the more maintenance it requires to look as though they haven’t given in to time. There’s the hair problem, and the need for exercise, and the sun spots and the wrinkles and the trips to the drug store for potions and lotions. There’s the dry skin and the rough feet and skin tabs.

I remember a time when there weren’t 16 nail salons on every street in America. Back then, we all had an emory board in our bathroom drawer and maybe a few times a year we’d throw a little nail polish on.

But when did the standard practice of taking weekly trips to get a manicure begin? Who stepped up to the throne and announced to women everywhere that we now need to have perfect nails?

I went with my daughters once to a big makeup store to get our faces done. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen pictures of the amazing transformations they do with makeup now, but I must say, we all looked transformed at the end of our session.

If only I’d had a pumpkin to hop into and a castle to visit.

So I bought all of the stuff and lugged it home in a big shopping bag with fancy handles and I’ll be darned if I had no idea how to put it all back on the next day.

I had five different brushes that were supposed to do five different things and bronzer and blush and a sparkly powder and liners for my eyes and my lips. At the end of my hour in front of the mirror, I looked like a five year old who had gotten into her mother’s makeup.

Occasionally I spot a woman who is perfectly groomed–not a hair out of place, the lipstick beautifully applied and set, the nails shiny and perfectly shaped, the skin clear and lovely.

And I know how long it took her to look that way, the amount of sheer effort expended to present an image of a nearly perfect human being.

I applaud her, but the thing is, I know I’d rather be home reading a book or painting a hallway.

I don’t think anyone realizes how much time and money it takes to age gracefully these days, especially when they keep changing the rules.