The numbers are with us - and that scares some hairbrush-touters

It’s official folks – the straighties are trying to kill us off. Why, you ask? When they have all the power suits, the jobs with golden handshakes, and the negatively geared properties in old-money suburbs, it hardly seems worth it. Because dear curlfriends we have the numbers – as recent revolutions in Eygpt and Tunisia have proven – it all eventually comes down to sheer volumes or a meteorite hitting the earth.

According to question and answer website, Chacha.com more than 70% of the world’s population has curly hair. It’s a pretty intimidating stat for those straight-haired, straight-hemmed folks who until now have been able to guard their ivory towers via a moat of humidifiers. Slowly, slowly though, they’ve noticed that folks like Obama (who should surely let his fuzz free) have been taking positions of power and low and behold fuzzies like Therese Rein have actually succeeded in business. Fearing the turning tables or even the ones just outside the toilets, they’ve had to up their efforts.

Exhibit one: just this week, I spied a Hoyts ad giving away hair straighteners with tickets to movies aimed squarely at teenage girls and love-lorn women with low self-esteem.  The aim here is to get to the young and vulnerable to believe that if they had conformed to the norm and flattened out the fuzz they too could a) be as good looking as demented ballerina; and b) snare an Ashton Kutcher type and live hairly ever after.

Exhibit two: the emergence and growing popularity of hair straightening fluids that appear to have been created by a crew of evil scientists from KAOS. The Age reported recently a product called Brazilian Blowout, which was outlawed in December last year in Australia, but is still readily available globally that contains formaldehyde. Now formaldehyde is a very useful chemical, if you’re looking to manufacture a car, disinfect against parasites, or embalm a body, but its affect on humans is less helpful. It’s known to cause all manner of irritations and allergies and more seriously it is listed by the World Health Organisation as a probable carcinogen i.e it could give you cancer. An overseas study has also linked formaldehyde to reproductive problems in women – not only are they trying to kill us off, they’re trying to make sure we can’t reproduce any more little fuzzies.

It seems death and loss of reproduction abilities aren’t the only side effects. A Geelong woman responded to The Age story stating that since she had the treatment early last year, half her hair had fallen out and it was still coming out. Clearly this is also a win for the straighties – if they can’t kill us, at least make us too bald to go out in public.

So, what can we do about this new campaign of terror? Firstly, those who’ve been burnt by this liquid and literally lost their frizz, do not settle (as much as it may be terribly tempting) for a lovely blunt bob wig, instead get yourself the biggest fake afro you can find. It will signal defiance and also play havoc with air traffic control visibility. And secondly, let’s hit back and send the developers of the straightening fluid a little powered formaldehyde on a hairbrush and see how they like it. Let’s face it, there’s no fear a fuzzy will use it instead.