Like many addictions, it starts as a psychological prop, a way of making yourself feel more confident in social situations. At first you only do it on a night out because everyone else does. But then you become dependent. Before you know it, you're indulging first thing in the morning and then in the loo at work when you think no one's looking. You do it after the gym and even on holiday. You forget what you were like before the addiction took hold. The idea of living without it sends a shiver of cold terror down your spine.
I talk not of narcotics, alcohol or cigarettes. I talk instead of something that millions of women can relate to on an everyday basis: the simple act of straightening one's hair.
Over the past decade, ironed-straight hair has become almost the default style for white females of a certain age. At some point in the early noughties, it seemed we all signed up to the cult of the poker-straight. Our obsession was fuelled by advances in technology and the ready availability of salon-quality straighteners on the high street. When ceramic-plated GHD hair straighteners first hit the shelves, we rushed en masse to grab a pair capable of transforming our frizzy mops into long, sleek manes worthy of a member of Atomic Kitten. Everyone was doing it. Even Jennifer Aniston, propagator of that iconic layered mid-90s haircut "The Rachel", went straight.
In the grip of our addiction we didn't care about the damage done to our split ends or the occasional forehead burn or the times we had to dash back to the house, panicked that we'd left our straighteners on and they were burning a hole through the carpet.
I was no exception. With my straighteners I could iron the natural kink out of my hair in five minutes every morning. It was quicker and easier than getting a blow-dry. When I started my first job on a newspaper, I told myself that straight hair looked more professional than my customary tangle. Soon the straighteners were just another part of my morning routine. I was so attached to them I once took a pair on assignment to Mali – even though I was staying in a hotel with no electricity. For the best part of a decade I was a slave to the straightener. I didn't think to question my subservience because everyone else was doing it, too.
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But now something strange is happening. Silently, stealthily, a generation of women has emerged from under the steaming shadow of 230C heat. And hair has once again become something to experiment with. Blow-dry bars have sprung up in city centres. Extensions are something you do to your scalp rather than the side-return of your house. A battery of gadgetry has reached salon shelves: curling tongs and hot rollers and hair extensions and Argan oil and dry shampoo. Pop stars such as Katy Perry and Kelly Osbourne are dyeing their hair shocking pink and purple. Lady Gaga wears oversize bows made of hair. Women grow fringes to be like Lou Doillon, sport undercuts to emulate Rihanna and style peroxide-blonde mohicans in homage to Emeli Sandé, and no one bats an eyelid.
"It's not one, iconic haircut any more," explains Luke Hersheson, an award-winning stylist and a brand ambassador for L'Oréal Kérastase. "People used to embrace having the same haircut as Jennifer Aniston. Now there are 20 or 30 new trends, and individuality is so much more important."
Hersheson says that social networks such as Twitter and Instagram, which enable celebrities to establish direct relationships with their fans, have meant that we are now able to leap on new trends far more quickly.
"We've always had celebrity influence, but the world's a lot smaller," Hersheson says. "When I was starting out in the early 90s, the only way I could find out what was happening was to assist hairdressers at a catwalk show. Those pictures were not released to the public for six months. Now I just go home and log on. The accessibility has changed massively."
Today hair is once again becoming a statement of individualism. Just in time, as it happens, because a few weeks ago my straighteners broke and my hair reverted to its untampered state: a nondescript wave that is neither one thing nor the other.
But the odd thing was that I no longer felt leaving the house without straightened hair was the visual equivalent of going out in public missing some vital item of clothing. Instead my female acquaintances were overwhelmingly positive.
Hair: Rihanna ‘Hair is once again becoming a statement of individualism’: Rihanna Photograph: Rex
My cousin said my hair looked better than she'd ever seen it. Some – like my friend Olivia – were almost affronted that I'd been hiding my curls from them for so long, as though I'd been leading a follicular double life. "You should leave your hair exactly as it is," Olivia insisted. "Throw the straighteners out."
The men I know were less sure. They thought my hair made me seem "a bit zany – like Minnie Driver". One male acquaintance cited Anita Roddick. My husband diplomatically said he liked it both curly and straight, which is basically why I married him. Interestingly, everyone I spoke to believed it made me look younger.
For women, hair is a tricky business. Straight or curly, it comes loaded with cultural meaning – a social symbol that, unlike clothing, is an intrinsic part of the body and one which grows on a daily basis.
"Hair is called a secondary sexual characteristic," says Philip Kingsley, one of the UK's leading trichologists, and the man who coined the term "bad hair day". "You can't flaunt your primary sexual characteristics in public, at least not in western society, so that's what makes your hair so important from a social viewpoint: it's about sexuality and morale. Lots of women, and men, find that if they are not happy with their hair then they are unhappy people."
Hair is a genetic inheritance, a marker of our biological roots, and yet the vast majority of us manipulate it through our lifetimes. The styling of our hair is, says Dr Sarah Cheang, a senior tutor at the Royal College of Art, a form of "social signalling". According to Cheang, who co-edited the book Hair: Styling, Culture and Fashion, our impulse to straighten, dye or curl our hair comes from a psychological need to disguise who we really are. When hair continues to grow, it threatens to betray our biological roots or our so-called "natural" identity to others.
"We may have decided that our 'true' or 'correct' identity should be something else," she says. "Thus hair might need to be dyed, bleached, straightened, curled or hastily removed."
As a result we bombard our hair with treatments. We allow it to affect our moods, and we treat it as a means of both adornment and self-expression. When we lose it – through alopecia or chemotherapy – the trauma is intense.
The issue becomes even more complex for black women, for whom straight hair can often only be achieved through great expense, the application of dangerous chemicals and the endurance of physical pain. Straightening the natural texture of black people's hair has been perceived as pacifying a culture dominated by white ideals of beauty – but that is another, even more politically charged story.
All of this contributes to the fact that the average woman in the UK spends £26,500 on her tresses over her lifetime. A quarter of the respondents to a 2010 poll of 3,000 people said they would rather spend money on their hair than food. And although the grim economic climate has seen visits to hair salons drop off, an increasing number of women are styling their hair at home.
A consumer report by Mintel states that ownership of hair-styling products has expanded by 4.4 million adults between 2007-10. Twenty million women own a hair dryer and more than 5 million own straighteners (25% of whom say they couldn't live without them).
But why do we bother? Why do we feel this need to tamper with our hair? Hersheson sees it as part of an inherent human covetousness: "It's part of our being to want something we haven't got. We've got a natural, built-in desire to enhance, change or experiment."
This could be true. A natural brunette, I remember being desperate to have blonde hair as a teenager because it seemed that all the boys fancied Pamela Anderson. It turns out there is plenty of historical precedent for blondes being more admired. The Edwardian explorer M French Sheldon claimed to have dazzled the locals in East Africa in 1906 with a white gown and a long blonde wig that apparently rendered her all-powerful and untouchable. But colour is a fluid concept.
"Blondeness used to be a sign of youth," says fashion historian Caroline Cox. "Now, because so many women post-50 are dyeing their hair blonde, it's a sign of maturity, and young women are increasingly dyeing their hair in a grey tone that's almost silver or pale blue."
Hair cut, too, has long been a social signifier. When the bob gained popularity in the 1920s it was emblematic of a new era of modernity and women's emancipation in the aftermath of the First World War – a literal cutting-off from outdated Edwardian traditions. In the 1960s both men and women grew their hair long to rebel against accepted establishment norms. In the 1980s the first wave of women in the workplace often cut their hair short in order to fit into a male-dominated environment (in Working Girl, Mike Nichols's 1988 film about a secretary who yearns to become a businesswoman, there is a seminal moment in which the protagonist, Tess, is so desperate to be taken seriously that she cuts off her soft blonde hair).
These days, according to Cox, the dominant trend is for styling rather than cutting, and for "glamorous, long hair, and lots of it". It is a look that crosses the social divide and yet simultaneously emphasises it. There is an assumption that pneumatic glamour models and female cast members of Towie rely on "fake" hair extensions, whereas the luscious natural locks of the Duchess of Cambridge bespeak a woman with the time and money to devote to a deluxe blow-dry.
Hair: Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge The glossy mane – a product of the deluxe blow-dry: the Duchess of Cambridge. Photograph: Nicolas Asfouri/AP
Other famous proponents of the glossy mane include the caramel-tinted Kim Sears – when her boyfriend Andy Murray won Wimbledon, the BBC devoted almost as many camera angles to capturing the rippling movements of Kim's astonishing hair as it did to the tennis. As a result of this trend, the UK is now the third largest importer of human hair in the world, with £38m worth entering the country in 2011 and a 70% market growth in the last five years. There are even reports of Russian prisoners having their heads shaved against their will and the harvesting of hair from corpses to meet the surge in demand.
"It's a traditional idea of female glamour and it's kind of boring," says Cox. "It's the whole pole-dancer look: huge heads of artificial hair, faces that look as if they've been dipped in a bucket of make-up, ultra short skirts and huge stripper heels. In terms of fashion and feminism, it's like: oh my God – what was I fighting for?"
Big, fake hair has reached the workplace, too – as evidenced by the female candidates on the recent series of The Apprentice, one of whom made repeated references to her "voluminous" bleached-blonde locks on her CV.
Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, a professor of critical theory at the University of Reading and editor of The Last Taboo: Women and Body Hair, sees this as part of a broader trend towards cosmetic enhancement.
"There's an idea now that the more successful a woman is, the more glamorous and sexy she should be," she says. "If not, she has sacrificed her femininity. It's the same with cosmetic surgery or Botox. It goes with the idea of 'having it all' – because if you're a boss and also a woman who doesn't comply with trying to look sexually attractive, then really you're like a man and you become a castrated bitch."
And because the semiotics of a woman's hair are so complex, so inextricably linked with the story she wants to tell about herself and so shaped by the outside forces of gender, commerce and culture, it is truly shocking when someone subverts the narrative.
Hair: Jessie J ‘Short hair is still equated with masculinity’: Jessie J. Photograph: Andy Sheppard/Getty
When Britney Spears shaved her head in full public view in 2007, it was viewed as disturbing physical evidence of a mental breakdown. And although in recent years it has become more common for women to have partially shaved heads as fashion statements, it remains rare to see a female celebrity embracing a full buzz cut unless it is for charity (as Jesse J did to raise money for Red Nose Day) or professional reasons (as Charlize Theron did for an upcoming role).
"Short hair is still equated with masculinity," says Lesnik-Oberstein. "I have very short hair, and in England I often get mistaken for a man. It happened to me recently with two older ladies who mistook me for a man in the loo and said: 'Sir, this is a ladies' loo' very politely. They were mortified when I told them I was actually a woman. That never happens to me on the continent – for instance in Germany or Holland, where a lot of these societies are more egalitarian and matriarchal."
By contrast the looseness of long hair is said to suggest both a moral looseness and a natural sensuality – it was partly for this reason that Victorian women only ever "let their hair down" in private and why many religious faiths still require women to cover their heads completely. Long hair recurs frequently in fairy tales as a metaphor for sexuality, serving to remind us how close and how distant we are from the animal within, whereas tied-up hair is used in popular culture to denote the sexually repressed or uptight.
According to Harvard academic Thom Hecht, "disciplined" hair symbolises "the unseen disciplined mind". In his essay "Hair Control: the Feminine Disciplined Head", he explains that a ballerina's swept-back chignon reflects the supreme physical control exercised over her own body.
Elizabeth Day with a ponytail. Elizabeth Day with a ponytail. Photograph: Phil Fisk for the Observer
All of which could explain why, when I had my hair styled in a tight ponytail for the shoot accompanying this feature, most people who saw me thought I looked "unapproachable" (which might simply be a polite way of saying: "You looked like you had a rattail and a Croydon facelift"). By contrast, the hairstyle with natural waves was deemed the most likeable. Poker-straight hair was, the photographer said, "cold and expressionless".
But for me, the biggest revelation was how liberated I felt with curly hair. There was something about the lightness of it, the way it bounced as I walked, that made me feel happier – perhaps because I wasn't spending the entire day worrying about whether my hair would frizz hideously if it made contact with water. And I suppose it felt more natural, too, less like I was trying to be something I'm not.
But "naturalness", says Sarah Cheang is "a socially constructed concept like any other". That is to say, because hair grows continuously, the management of it whether by cutting or styling is – and always has been – an essential part of human social existence.
And in truth I'm not sure I'll be ditching the hair straighteners immediately. I definitely feel more comfortable experimenting with different styles than I used to, but I'm not sure I'm quite ready to abandon a decade's worth of personal grooming experience. It's going to be a gradual process of weaning myself off the GHDs before I get myself back on to the straight and narrow. In a manner of speaking, that is.
Elizabeth Day's hair was styled by Marc Trinder, art team director at Charles Worthington (020 7631 1370; charlesworthington.com)
