“Massage your hair and scalp thoroughly with a vegetable oil, then steam the hair and scalp for half an hour by wrapping your head in a hot, damp terry towel” Arlene Dahl, Always Ask a Man.

Before I go and get my BRAND NEW HAIRCUT (coming soon!), I wanted to give my old hair one last hurrah with a hot oil treatment (also, if it went really badly, it wouldn’t matter because I was getting it professionally shampooed and they could deal with it).  Since we were out of olive oil (except for the rosemary and garlic kind, good on bread, bad on head) I decided to go with coconut oil, because it says on the package that it’s what the beautiful people use for shiny hair.  I want to be both

I melted it down and it didn’t go in quite as easily as I thought it would.  The hot towel posed a whole other set of problems, since we just went through a cold snap and the house isn’t exactly balmy.  It went cold every few minutes, and I kept having to microwave it, which meant pausing the terrible SVU rerun I was watching on Hulu because the new season of Arrested Development made me feel uncomfortable and sad (yeah, I said it).

At the end of all of it, my hair was shiny…in a guido, unwashed hair kind of way.  It took a few shampoos to get all of it out and even then it looked a little weighed down and sticky.  Live and learn, I guess.  Onward to new hair!