Chick Wit: Lisa Scottoline: Conditional conditioner

Every woman has a hair history.

Or is it a hairstory?

Let me tell you mine, then I'll get to my point.

We begin, as always, with The Flying Scottolines, and, growing up, we all used the same bathroom, which contained exactly one bottle of shampoo: Head & Shoulders.

By the way, none of us had dandruff.

Those white spots on our clothes were lint.

I can't explain why Mother Mary always bought us Head & Shoulders, except that I suspect she thought it was fancier than our old shampoo, which was called Suave.

By the way, we weren't suave, either.

We aspired to being suave, with dandruff.

I come from a long line of aspirational shampoo buyers.

In any event, we used our creamy, aqua Head & Shoulders shampoo and felt pretty good about ourselves, until one day when I was in high school. I was with my first boyfriend at a party, which was held outside. It was August, which is definitely a bad-hair month in Philly.

Which is a bad-hair city.

You know it's true.

It's the City of Brotherly Locks.

For women.

Anyway, back to the party. My curly, frizzy, wavy hair had already exploded, and my boyfriend made the mistake of trying to touch my hair.

This was back in the old days, when men actually touched my hair.

Overrated.

Anyway, his hand got caught in my hair and he couldn't get it out, as if I had the Venus flytrap of hair.

I caught a man.

Then I tore off his wings.

Just kidding.

In fact, I was completely embarrassed, and after my boyfriend finally freed his fingers from my carnivorous hair, he said, "You should really use a conditioner."

I didn't even know what conditioner was. And that's how naive I was back then. I was a conditioner virgin.

So I went home and told Mother Mary that we needed conditioner, and, after much grumbling, on her next trip to the grocery store, she returned home with something that purported to be shampoo and conditioner in the same bottle, called Pert Plus.

Like I said, aspirational.

I may not be suave, but I'm nothing if not pert plus.

So I used the stuff, but the truth is, it didn't seem to make any difference. My hair was still tangly, curly, wavy, and frizzy, and, on occasion, my own hand got stuck in it.

Medusa, needing mousse.

So I consulted my girlfriends and all of them agreed that the two-in-one products didn't work and that I needed conditioner that came in its own bottle, so I went to ask my mother.

"No," Mother Mary said flatly. "We don't need two bottles in the shower."

"But it will change my life," I argued, meaning it.

"No it won't. It won't even change your hair."

Mother Mary ruled the house, so fast-forward to the present day, when I get my own house, with a shower all to myself.

It's filled with approximately 12 different bottles of conditioner.

No two-in-ones for this girl.

Each one separate from shampoo.

Head and shoulders above everything else.

Very suave.

And every time I wash my hair, I use conditioner in the shower, then I spray on a detangler and comb through with Moroccan oil.

The result?

My hair looks greasy all the time.

There is so much damn product in my hair that even the smallest dollop of shampoo explodes on contact with my head, which is the telltale sign of product overload.

Also, I produce so much lather that I'm wearing a meringue pie.

Evidently, each time I shampoo, I'm shampooing the conditioner.

And I don't know how to stop the madness.

So I asked my girlfriends, who told me there's a special shampoo you can buy and a special conditioner you can use, which together will somehow strip out all of the other shampoos and conditioners.

But I'm not buying.

Do I need more product to eliminate my product?

I'm beginning to suspect that Mother Mary was right, yet again.

She loved me, unconditionally.

Look for Lisa and Francesca's latest humor collection, "Does This Beach Make Me Look Fat?" Also, look for Lisa's new Rosato & DiNunzio novel, "Corrupted," in stores now.

lisa@scottoline.com.