Customs: The Day of the Roller

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Whether she did it to catch a prince, like Rapunzel, or to avoid a taxing situation, like Godiva, the girl who took down her hair in days of yore never thought twice about the trouble involved. But then, why should she? She had nothing to undo but a braid or a ribbon and presto, crowning glorysville! It is only the modern maid who spends the better part of her days putting up her hair and is not about to take it down until she's good and ready.

Women have been going about in curlers for years, always in the hope of getting crinkles to wave, waves to coil, coils to stand up and be counted. Fortunately, the means to curly ends—bobby pins, hairpins, miniature rollers or just plain rags—could be easily camouflaged around the house. In public, the works could be concealed under a snood or scarf, even fitted accommodatingly under a bathing cap. Most important, the head that hit the pillow (encompassed though it was in scrap metal) never had to worry about going to sleep: the weight of a million bobby pins, in fact, often proved a sort of sedative.

But times have changed, and so have hair styles. Curls today are for the birds, and French poodles. Current styles call for sleek, straight hair. It is a look made possible only by the use of rollers, metal or plastic, ranging up to 3 in. in diameter and designed to subdue, not support, the slightest hint of curl. What rollers cost is sleep, and women who cannot get used to a Japanese wooden neck rest have only one choice: set at dusk and sit up till dawn or set by day, rest easy at night.

Accordingly, rollers have rolled out from bathroom cabinets and dressing-table drawers. Impossible to conceal, gaudy in color, they make a display of what was once an embarrassment. Increasingly, these Saturdays, the odd woman in almost any suburban shopping center is the one without rollers. Rollered women tread libraries and museums, department stores and movie theaters, put their rollered heads together over a bridge table, even go to confession rollered.

The rollered lady seems to be living in some perpetual state of anticipation; she has taken her mark, got set, and is ready to go, always—by implication—to an event deemed more important than what she is presently doing. But the day may come when the rollers never come off at all; at opening nights and White House dinners, the ladies may come coiffed in rollered color, bright as an op painting, brittle as a petrified forest.