Dorothy Hamill's hair

It was functional and low maintenance.

perky, easy to imitate and you too could be famous

WHO?!

It was a rather butch look.

It looks very [WHISPERS] leeeeeesbian.

It was that sassy, easy to maintain working-mom look. Also perfect for an athlete who actually does move a lot. I work with a 50 something (or maybe even 60 something, I darent ask her age) frau with this EXACT haircut. Unflattering at any age.

I agree that it was one of the most unflattering women's hair cuts ever. My mother who has always been fashion-challenged decided to adopt it a decade before I was born and to this day still sports some adaptation of this very style. She claims that it is easy to color and doesn't require blow drying except on "special occasions". She has really ridiculously thick hair and it usually looks like a pom pom (hers never did take the shape of Dorothy's really although the cut and angle are always identical to the once famous star's). I love her so I never bring up the subject.

Cute and perky?

Now it is popular with incel spree killers

Toni Tennille often split the difference between the Wedge and the Full Bonnie Franklin Mushroom.

No. Not perky. Sassy.

It's actually not that bad looking on someone like Hamill who has a rather smallish head. But, it looks ridiculous on a woman with a very large head. I knew a woman with the haircut, and the only way I can describe it is to think of Dorothy Hamill's hair on Sarah Huckabee Sanders' head. It was NOT a good look for her.

Who?

Did it look better with 70's sensibilities?

Huckabee is like when Tweety took the potion and got big

Is the Captain TOTALLY coked out in that photo??

I mean, it's a great haircut if you're cute, not too fat, and have relatively non-frizzy hair.

(But if you're those three things, most haircuts will look great on you.)

It's something like the executive bob, but without the severe bangs of an Anna Wintour, or (without bangs) the need to hairspray them up and to the side or tuck them behind the ear.

(Meg Ryan had something similar, but "messied," in the 1990s.)

The British version.

Cute

Dorothy’s hair looked great when she was skating at the Olympics back in the day. It’s a hair style that not everyone can pull off. First of all you have to have the right hair texture and a really cute face. It beats the new short pixie hair style. You definitely need a cute or pretty face and a body that goes with it. A very large female would look ridiculous trying to wear their hair in a pixie cut. However, both require very little maintenance.

R19 is a "pageboy," a slight variation.

It TWIRLS.

Earth shoes were the Dorothy Hamill wedge for feet.

I think she looked good with that cut, particularly in OP's pic. Why did it become a mainstream sensation? I have no idea. I watched it all go down in real time. I was a child at the time. I didn't understand then, and I don't understand it now.

The Vidal Sasson cut.

Sassoon

Is that what was called the Hamill Camel?

Dorothy is a lovely woman. Still a bit sporty and sensible looking but she's pretty.

No Rose, R27. The Hamill Camel was a reference to Dorothy's infamous Camel Toe.

^I miss Mr. Sassoon and his old formula shampoo.

Sassoon did not create Dorothy's "wedge cut", credit goes to the equally famous (at the time) Japanese stylist Suga.

It was cut in a literal wedge shape - longer top layers and graduated short layers beneath giving it that swingy look in motion.

All the fraus wanted to look like darling Ms. Hamill and get a Suga type cut at the local salon. Unfortunately, it was an intricate and precise cut, so none of them were able to actually achieve the look on the cheap.

[quote]You see, I need more than just the body from a blow dryer for my hair to look its best. I need lots of body [italic]and[/italic] shine, too. That's why I use Short & Sassy.

Lies! There's no body whatsoever in the final picture.

r32,

thanks for posting the ad.

She was a hottie--still is.

It's the hairstyle equivalent of abstinence. It was meant to reduce het sex. Mostly adopted by married women so their husbands would not fuck them. It can work for straight or gay men too.

[quote]Cute and perky?

No. Short and sassy.

Dorothy got to fuck Dino Martin, Jr., one of the hottest male celebrity offsprings ever.

Damn. Dorothy Hamill was lucky. Did not know Dino was so hawt.

Suga

would you say joanne's hair in Sybil was a wedge cut?

You have to remember what came before Dorothy's wedge to get the correct perspective.

It was Short & Sassy as opposed to Long & Silky.

The wedge issue: DL favourite Joyce Bulifant? Not sure if this is a wedge, but it is sassy

Plenty of men were walking around with this cut too.

With the invent of birth control and Equal Rights, women for the first time had choices. They had a choice to not be a feminine ideal based on straight male tastes or go completely overboard with plastic surgery to keep up with straight male “tastes.” Which unfortunately causes heterosexual women into a world of anorexia and plastic surgery to now look “normal.” An easy keep hairdo free of fake hair and glue that is painful is what straight men expect.

^^^ not expect. Chardonnay typing.

R45. Dad the whole post is a disaster. A dude who has never been inside a woman shouldn't pretend to know what they think. Plus the ladies cut their hair short a hundred years ago. Nothing to do with birth control. They wanted to work and dance, be out the door quicker. They let them out sometimes.

Don't quit the chardonnay but maybe you should listen to some Linda Ronstadt? That's what the older men here like on a Saturday night.

Well, pouring more Chardonnay as I reapply my wig tape.

'60s icon Shirley Feeney sported Dorothy Hamill hair long before Dorothy Hamill.

Yeah, but Shirley wasn't sexy.

lmao at this thread title

A short bob is not a wedge. People keep posting images of short bobs, like Cindy William's. That's not the same thing at all.

A wedge cut has that geometric angle in the back.

But is it decade appropriate?

Since this is Datalounge, we should probably discuss her hairdresser and his partner's twin houses in the Pines; both of which must be fossilized under layer upon layer of nacreous permacum by now.

Exactly R51. People are kind of dumb about things. Most just lump general shapes and ideas together. I have to unfollow this thread now because there isn't much more to say and yet so many get it wrong. See now R52 has affronted us again. That is nothing, she's not even a haircut. I can't take anymore. I wasn't even born when Dorothy Hamill had hair but it still upsets me that morons think that their mom's messy bob is synonymous with a seismographic linear precision layered game changing haircut!

400

426

Come back, r54!

Suga died of the aids, didn't he?

Thanks for that ad r32. Those pics revealed the guide used for the cut.

R32 is not even a good hair day for Dorothy. They tried to make her look more attainable when everyone should now realize she was not ever so. You think you can look like Farrah with just her shampoo and a curling iron? No you fucking can't. Dorothy was more than short and sassy. She was follicular perfection tended like a japanese garden. Cindy fucking Williams can't look like her. None of you can!!!

Speaking of Suga... Back in the later 80s I went to school with a girl from an elite NYC family. I was from practical old New England and had never met such a cosmopolitan person my age. Even now that I’m middle-aged, I still marvel at her pedigree and lifestyle. She was jaded and droll and troubled.

She would mention these people like Suga and I’d be like “Suga?” (I didn’t even know any Japanese people!) Since I was so naive and such a yokel, it couldn’t even be considered name-dropping; I was too sheltered to be impressed.

Anyway. Suga.

R61, don't leave us hanging, friend; tell us something more about her.

Are you still friends? What's she up to now? (WHET your cosmopolitan friend?)

Also, could the poster who said he "wasn't even born when Dorothy had hair" explain himself?

R15 "Huckabee is like when Tweety took the potion and got big"

Haha!

R62, she died ten years after we graduated, of cancer. We were supposed to attend the same college but I changed my mind, and then I did run into her one random night at La MaMa. We went out drinking (WCOU on First Avenue) and she was down and seemed to be bored with life.

I don’t know what she’d be doing now. Something artsy for sure. She was an art major (she didn’t really have to worry about starving). Her sisters made marriages to appropriately wealthy and influential men. I can’t see her going that route, although you never know.

Sorry to derail the Dorothy Hamill thread. To bring it back to topic, when I was a little girl, I had the doll and the wedge haircut.

I remember well the year that led to Dorothy Hamill's 1976 Olympic gold medal. Her hair was a big deal because it looked great on her (no surprise there, she's beyond cute) but mostly because it moved beautifully during her skating -- particularly her spins -- and then fell into place looking polished and neat when she stopped. It deserved its own credit, along the music and choreography.

Compared to the formless but practical short cut of Janet Lynn or the stiff, matronly do of the lovely Peggy Flemming, Hamill's hair was modern and, yes, sassy. (And the hair texture itself was also shiny, healthy, and absolutely gorgeous.)

It was a perfect combination of form and function that was not the least bit flattering on almost anyone else.

I had that cut for three years in junior high school. It was darling on me and fit my face. Then I decided to get a perm and my hair changed forever.

You thought Danny Thomas was one, right R5?

Yes, Dorothy really made that haircut work when she on the ice, especially with her spins. And r66 is right, her hair would fall perfectly back into place when she was done.

Here she is at the 1976 World's. The haircut really works.

The Hamill Camel is at around the 4 minute mark of this video. Her signature move as she drops down from a camel spin.

Well put, R66. It worked really well on her, moved beautifully, and was neat. It may not have been Sassoon, but it had that same clean angularity.