A Thousand Hair Follicles All Singing Hallelujah

Radical pleasure prompt: a brush through your hair

There’s a scene in the 1993 movie Sommersby that gets me every time. Richard Gere may be a Civil War charlatan who is impersonating a dead man but when he starts brushing Jodie Foster’s hair, I can feel it in my toes.

It started early for me, as I imagine it does for many girls. Budding stylists with a feathery touch, we braided and brushed each other’s hair through elementary school, experiencing the dopamine rush of triggered nerve endings in the scalp for the first time.

As I got older, this particular pleasure happened far too infrequently. And the doer had to apply just the right amount of pressure. Not too hard and not too light. Kind of like Goldilocks.

At the hair salon, I labored through perms and highlights where the stylist used a knitting needle to pluck my strands through a kind of shower cap. This was the 1980s. The payoff, however, was the two minutes at the sink where she shampooed and massaged my scalp or the too-brief time of pleasure at the end of the blow-dry.

Maybe I have the misfortune of being born in the wrong century. The women of yore knew just what I’m talking about and apparently they were better at self-care in this regard.

From the 1909 San Francisco Call:

For a regular evening treatment, there should be at least twenty long strokes of the brush after all snarls have been removed with a comb. The stroking should be even and firm, without causing pain.

And The Saint Paul Globe from 1902:

‘The best method of stimulating the scalp is massage, which any girl may practice, instead of the old-time injunction of one hundred strokes nightly with a stiff bristle brush. Lift the hair up from the scalp, allowing the air to pass through it close to the roots, and gently massage, using the balls of the fingers; never the tips.’

But me brushing my own hair, or massaging my scalp, did not have nearly the same effect, even though I knew what I wanted. And when I’ve asked my spouse to do it, he was game — but no connoisseur.

For a time, I lucked out with my daughter. In school for Mother’s Day, she made me an IOU jar. Other moms may have wanted stacked dishes or made beds but all my IOUs were cashed in by handing her a brush. And she was excellent. A few years later, unfortunately, she is much more interested in brushing her own hair so I’m out of luck again.

At least until I discovered ASMR hair brushing videos.

Just what exactly is ASMR? Well, it stands for autonomous sensory meridian response and is likened to a ‘pleasant paresthesia’, or tingling of the skin. In the YouTube videos, you watch someone get their hair brushed to experience the response. These videos have tens of thousands of views.

Before I watched my first one, I was skeptical — but just like with the movie, it turns out that the second-hand experience can trigger a lot of the same rapturous sensations. Some of the ASMR videos have the brusher crooning to you Bob Ross style, but I prefer only the sound of the brush slowly raking through hair a lot more luxurious than mine.

Does this make me weird? A hair fetishist? Or someone who desperately needs a spa trip?

Maybe, but it also summons the memory of the first time a friend ran her fingers through my hair — Goody barrette or scrunchie in hand — and the shiver traveled up and down my spine like a benign, bountiful electrical current.

Paging Richard Gere.

Betsy Denson, 2020