Coils ain’t coils. Going curly just got complicated…

Time to get confessional, peeps. And personal. Deeply personal.

Towards the end of last year I started noticing some serious moulting. Hair clumped around the shower drain, stray strands in food and a few more than usual wound around the teeth of my ‘afro’ comb. Not surprising, given hair loss is a product of hormonal change due to impending menopause (me) and stress (also me). We grow old, we grow anxious, and things drop off and fall apart. It’s life.

Still, there’s something confronting about losing your hair. I’m hardly going bald (not yet anyway) but running my fingers through my freshly blow-waved hair before a big event last year sent a chill up my spine. My hair never felt so thin, wispy and insubstantial. There’s a strange, primitive sense of diminution, a loss of vitality that goes hand in hand with losing your hair.

So I decided I would no longer blow-wave my hair, or lighten portions of it in an effort to ‘work’ with the grey (bleach can’t be good right?). No longer would I try for the sleek silver-fox look. I decided once and for all I would revert to my dark, adolescent curly locks.

Sounds like it should be easy. Wash, condition, chuck in some expensive salon-brand curling product and voila – instant rockin’ locks. Alas no, it wasn’t quite so easy.

Years of repeated bleaching, blow-drying and an irregular curl pattern (my hair is a mix of spirals, waves and coils) meant my hair needed serious attention – especially since the only hairdresser I trusted to cut my hair had gone back to the UK. Dry and damaged, plus no real haircut in months meant my hair was growing into a weird, fuzzy shape. I would go into work looking like a badly-cropped poodle then twist my hair into a messy pony tail at my desk. Depressing and despairing…

Enter the internet, the greatest tool bestowed upon the curious autodidact with too much free time.

I Googled ‘looking after damaged curly hair’ and discovered a curly-hair movement/ revolution/ renaissance/ reformation has been taking place right under my nose.

After years of being told to straighten their hair because it’s more WASP/ acceptable in the workplace/ professional/ sophisticated/ sexy etc. a whole bunch of angry ‘curlies’ have jettisoned their straightening irons and rediscovered their natural waves, kinks, coils, curls, spirals and twisty bits. They have binned the sulphate-containing shampoos and chemical conditioners, and embraced the natural (vegan!) stuff to manage their natural hair. I have lost count of the number of dedicated curly-hair websites.

I confess I found myself getting swept along by their fervour.

So based on an astonishing number of positive reviews on Amazon and the number of times it popped up on various websites, I started using the Kinky-Curly range of sulphate-free shampoo and conditioner (their leave-in conditioner ‘Knot Today’ is the crack-cocaine of curly hair) thoughtfully delivered by my ‘Amazon mule’ Red Karpitz. I noticed an immediate difference in my hair’s texture after only a few days.

The fervour took hold. Over the last few weeks I

binned my straightening irons.
stopped drying my hair with a hair dryer.
bought a microfiber ‘snood’ to towel-dry my hair.
started sleeping on a satin pillow-case.
joined three curly-hair forums and a curly girls Facebook group.
started using pomade as part of my styling regimen.
made an appointment to visit Neel Loves Curls – a dedicated curly hair cutter – in late May (birthday treat).
self-diagnosed my hair ‘type’ (not a joke). I believe I am a 3c/4a, low density, high porosity ‘coily’.

I am a woman obsessed.

I am also losing less hair.

What???!!! Not another rev-head exhibition, Dusty!

Oh yes, peeps, you read right: another exhibition to excite the rev-heads, petrol-heads, design buffs and motoring boffins. And it's only a two hour drive North of Melbourne in sunny Shepparton.

Muddy and I have just returned from a weekend away in fruit-canning country, where we enjoyed two remarkable exhibitions dedicated to car design and manufacture. Yep, TWO exhibitions.

The Shepparton Art Museum is hosting Dream Machines, a terrific collection of more than a hundred hand-drawn illustrations of cars - both concept and production vehicles from the 1940s to the 1970s - from America's iconic carmakers. The materials are pretty prosaic - pencils (graphite and colour), magic markers and ink pens and occasional watercolour brushwork - but the sketches are gorgeous and near-photographic in their precision. This is before CAD, people, when artists and designers drew this cool shit by hand.

A tasty accompaniment to this, is the amazing selection of fully-restored cars on show (4-5 actual real-life manufactured and fully restored cars featured among some the sketches in Dream Machines) at the Shepparton Motor Museum, just 10 minutes out of town on the main highway.

A $17 adult ticket buys you entry to both exhibitions - and you don't need to visit them on the same day.

Dusty says check them out.

(A pleasant surprise was discovering the work of a local artist, Jane Spencer, on display in the wing next to the Shepparton Art Museum. This talented local has some terrific landscapes and still-lives on show).

NGV exhibition in top gear!

Howdy culture vultures! It’s getting to that time of year – shorter days, cooler nights, brief sunny bursts punctuated by rainy afternoons. This means indoor pursuits like degustation dinners, museum visits, footy matches on Foxtel in pubs, open-fire trivia nights and art gallery crawls are just around the corner.

To kick-start (or indeed rev-up) your winter entertainment regimen, I highly recommend you get down to the National Gallery of Victoria (Ian Potter at Federation Square) and check out the exhibition Shifting Gear: Design, Innovation and the Australian Car which “presents some of our most iconic vehicles as objects of art and design”.

As the online catalogue says:

“Shifting Gear: Design, Innovation and the Australian Car, traces the development of the family car from its earliest form, as a steam-powered ‘horseless carriage’, through to its present-day role as a major design object and highly refined and efficient means of transport.”

Petrol heads, cultural historians, design buffs, boffins and engineering geeks will all find something to like here. It takes no more than an hour to enjoy the exhibits, and soak up some gorgeously restored works of engineering art.

Runs until 12 July 2015.