Summer Shortcut

Like Paris hemlines and Italian governments, women's hair styles tend to rise and fall with cyclical regularity. Bearing names reminiscent of characters in a Disney movie (the Pixie, Poodle, Ape and Artichoke), those styles have often been far more decorative than practical. This summer, however, the favored wave in hair styling reflects convenience rather than elegance. It is the summer of the scissor in hair salons across the U.S., as starlets, social-register types, housewives and coeds are emerging with their hair cut shorter -and simpler -than many a man's.

"Women are tired of the motorcycle-helmet look," says Atlanta Hairdresser Don Shaw, who arranges more than 1,600 heads a month. "Hair that looks natural looks feminine." The essence of that natural look is brevity -wash-'n'-wear hair occasionally trimmed as short as an eighth of an inch. The result: hair as suitable for tennis in the morning as for dinner out at night. For its wearer, rollers and pin curls are part of the past.

Just as style is changing, so too is the hair treatment in many salons. Lacquer spray and other synthetic chemicals are giving way to "natural" preparations. Shaw, for instance, favors avocado oil and mayonnaise, which he claims make hair shiny and restore the natural oils lost through bleaching.

Fancier shops now boast resident "hairologists" whose only mission is to prescribe the proper natural treatment and conditioning for feeble follicles. To test the latest in hair care, TIME Reporter-Researcher Audrey Ball visited Sassoon's, a leading Manhattan salon. There under the direction of Hairologist George Resh, a single strand was plucked from her head and examined in a Jape microgram calculator. The machine pronounced her hair dry and brittle, with its tensile strength hovering between an "excessively deficient" and "deficient" protein structure.

"For treatment," Ball reports, "I was acidified with a protein shampoo, conditioned with a ten-minute bake job under the dryer (after which my head felt as though it had been thrust in a mud puddle and left to rot on a lonely stretch of dusty road), shampooed again, and then finished off with a creme rinse. After 40 minutes of treatment, I at last got to go to the styling room where, with a quick snip of the scissors, five inches of my newly conditioned hair was sent to the floor."

Customers, of course, are leaving more behind in salons than their hair. Ball's tab came to $47, including tips. Though easier to maintain, the natural look is no less costly to acquire, and satisfied patrons usually return in five to six weeks for more conditioning and another cut. For dissatisfied patrons, life can be more difficult. Unlike hemlines, haircuts cannot be committed to the closet. In most cases, this summer's new look will continue into fall, and winter as well.

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