By Nidhi Kinhal
Do you remember that scene in Bride Wars, where Anne Hathaway’s character Emma replaces her best friend-turned-rival Liv’s (played by Kate Hudson), hair colour in the run up to her wedding day? Liv’s hair ended up blue, and her face was coloured with shock.
Imagine if the girls who had watched the movie swarmed around parlours and dyed their hair blue and made it a trend (it kind of is, anyway)? Also, imagine waking up to blue heads. It’s not like there’s a dearth of trends that make no sense, but apparently, with the madly popular frizzy perm initiated by Pooja Bhatt, that’s exactly what happened.
Pooja Bhatt’s frizzy perm hairstyle from Dil Hai Ke Manta Nahin was actually a disaster, she revealed to Hindustan Times. “Unlike today, we didn’t have stylists and PRs planning for one year how to debut a particular look. My permed hair was an accident, it was not meant to be that at all… I had gone to Nalini & Yasmin for a haircut and Dar Blo Bar, the famous UK-based hair stylists had come down to do some workshop. Everyone was trying out different things. At one point Nalini asked, ‘Who wants to try out the perming curlers?’ It was a prospect of experimentation and of course my hand went up first! And so, I became the chosen one to try out the perming curlers!”
Maybe this is why people don’t trust their hairstylists, or are nervous about haircuts. Two hours in, she realised that people were staring at her, baffled “When they opened the curls, and I saw myself in the mirror, I was shocked! My hair looked like a bird’s nest! But it was not a temporary thing, so I went back home with it. In the following few days I tried curling and scrunching to make it a bit manageable. I had to shoot, so I shot with that hair.” Then, she says, it suddenly “became a rage”.
Bollywood hairstyles are, or were, a huge thing. Be it Sharmila Tagore’s ‘bouffant‘, the ‘Sadhana cut‘, named after the actress who popularised it, Asha Parekh’s ‘beehive‘ with a flower on it, Dimple Kapadia’s overflowing mane in Saagar, Rekha’s long tresses in Silsila or even a pre-sanskaari Kajol in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai — they’ve informed generations of trends. The strong presence of a celebrity haircut influence seems to have significantly faded, but I mean, if some hairstylist with a popular client were to screw up, who knows what’ll see next? Maybe the undercut on the side?