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And the same week, I think we stayed for a week there, one day my mom had an idea.
It must have been Saturday when she said that girls have to get perms.
I was twelve and my sister was ten.
Well, at first it felt like a very great idea, so we went to get perms.
At that time, perms were made for women, girls didn’t do it very often.
But my mom had always been in Helsinki and for her it was completely natural
that girls started to dress up and do their hair at a very young age.
We got to the hairdresser’s seat and she put all the things,
it was a Nestlé permanent, I remember it very well.
She had very thick rubber rolls which also had a metal part in them.
And when she rolled the hair around it, the metal part was pressed on my head and it was burning the scalp.
The whole operation was a huge pain.
The rolls were also very heavy, so the little girl’s head was all bent to the other side.
I think it went on for two or three hours, so my neck was all broken.
Well, it was quite beautiful when we both got the perm and the hairdresser had made it,
but we couldn’t make it look pretty on our own.
We had long braids when we came to Helsinki.
Then we had to wash ourselves and the hair got wet.
then it went up, really big and frizzy.
It was like an afro hair!
We started to cry, for the first time on that trip; what happened to this hair...
We just couldn’t understand it.
Well, we had to go back home so we flattened it in some way.
We got home to our grandmother near Kuopio
first when we got out of the bus our grandmother started to cry.
She saw our hair! She wasn’t happy at all.
Our hair looked so awful.
Immediately when we got back to our grandmother I started to grow my hair.
The next time I came to Helsinki my hair was long again.
Nowadays people wear braids but I remember my firs perm, it really was terrible.