Letting Loose

Maintaining A Style That Goes Against Your Natural Color And Texture Can Be Exhausting. Lauren Mechling Finds Easing Up Has Unexpected Benefits

It wasn’t the most likely of couplings. When my parents met in college, my mother was a Canadian Jew who dressed in Ferragamo. My father was a Pittsburgh prep who had possibly heard of Hebrews. (Italian designers were definitely not his thing.) All these years later, they remain hopelessly devoted, reading the newspaper aloud to each other at breakfast and taking phone calls as a pair. So much happiness! But their union is not without its flaws. By which I mean my hair.

My dad’s jet-black mop was salt-and-pepper by his early 30s. And, after years of neck-breaking straightening that involved an actual iron and board, my mother surrendered to her lion’s mane of curls by the time I was born. My younger sister has dodged these hereditary bullets; at 36, her silky chestnut curtain is without a single thread of gray. Ever the lucky firstborn, I got Mom’s coarse texture and Dad’s premature color drain.