It wasn't always that way. "The hairstyle that I had when I came onto the scene five years ago was the same one I had since I was 16 years old!" Faith recalls. "You can look back at my high school annual.
"I always wore it back in a ponytail or in barrettes. I was bored out of my mind with it. I wanted something different. And on the road it was just impossible, because my hair was so curly. It was frizzy and with the humidity, it was horrible.
"I would thumb through magazines and go, 'Oh, I want my hair to look like that.' Shorter hair seemed so easy and fun. So Earl chopped my hair off-and I've loved it ever since."
"Earl" is Earl Cox of Nashville's Trumps Salon. Faith recently joined friends Pam Tillis, Suzy Bogguss, and Jo Dee Messina at Barbara Mandrell's home to show Earl thier appreciation.
"People give us compliments on our hair," Barbara adds. "Well, it's not us-it's Earl."
"Earl does short-order hair," Pam says jokingly. "Anybody I've ever worked with, it took them the forever to cut my hair. I'm sitting there, and the longer it took them the more nervous I got. With Earl, it takes about 7 minutes. Even when my hair was long, he could do it that quick."
Faith has experimented with several styles-most notably going platinum during her "Spontaneous Combustion" tour a couple of years ago. "The most fun that I had was when I was platinum blonde," she recalls. "We bleached my hair out so bad. I also had the big ringlet curls going on. That was real fun. It wasn't for everyday, but for awards shows or performances and anything like that, it was really great. It was a cool look. It was probauly not the most popular among my fans," Faith says, smiling. "Fans definitely tell you what they feel. But it was my favorite because it was so different."
Faith laughs as she recalls a multicolored "hair accident." "I was doing the roller thing with big curls in my hair one night," she says. "And the chemicals from the product mixed with the hear of the curling iron. My hair turned pink! So a couple of nights, I went out with pink curls around my face. It was totally accidental, but now some people are doing it as a 'look.' Even so, it wasn't for me."
The "braided" look wasn't for Faith, either. "Once when my hair was about shoulder length, four of my girlfriends and I went on this trip to the French West Indies," she recalls. "It was a 'chick vacation.' A couple of us had our hair braided by an island girl. My hair is so thin and my braids were so tiny that when I went to take them out, my hair was completely fried-ruined. In a lot of places my hair broke off. So I wnt to Earl and he had to chop my hair off. It was the shortest I've ever had it.
Faiths current short "do" is the carefree, "messy" look. "It's really simple," she says. "Honestly, all I do is take a shower and put a little product on it after I get out of the shower. Sometimes I blow it dry and sometimes I don't. All depending on how much time I have. I have narurally curly hair. Though I've lost a lot of the curl since I've had the two girls," adds the mother of Gracie, 1, and 5-month-old Maggie.
My hair's real easy to take care of because of the cut. I just don't have the time or the patience to fix my hair. And once you have someone fixing your hair all the time like Earl, it never looks as good as when he does it."
Suzy agrees. "I remember a couple of album covers ago," she says. "Two days before the shoot I said, 'I want to go dark brown. Put dark brown hair on me.'
"Earl said, 'Girl, I don't think we should do that. We'll try some streaks.' So we put some dark brown streaks in it and it made my skin turn sallow. It looked scary. So I went in the next day and we spent a couple of hours trying to get it back to the color that it was before. Finally we got it exactly where it was. We were like, 'It's beautiful! It's so perfect,' Then we realized after the pictures came out that it looked exactly like it did before we started messing with it."
Jo Dee know onstage you've got to look as good as you sound. "No matter what buisness you're in, I think that if you look the best that you can, you'll feel better about yourself," Jo Dee says. "It's easier to carry yourself in front of 40,000 people."
"Earl's Girls" presented him with a silver box evgraved with thier signatures. Inside the box were lock of each star's hair. It's a gift he'll treasure forever.
"They will never know how much this means to me," Earl says, "I love these girls." Back to articles