In my heart, my hair is so big they can smell my hairspray on Jupiter. In real life, it is wispy and lacks any specific ambition, unlike that of my late grandmother, whose fake hair was so enormous it was like an extra head and was the power-pack for her bombast. I didn't appreciate what big hair may have done for her until recently. In the 80s and early 90s, I didn't understand why anyone would want to crown herself with a prickly claw made out of her own hair and drive around in a Trans Am that had a tiger painted on the hood. I'm a late bloomer to wisdom.

We're told that hemlines go down during a recession, and hairstyles becomes softer and less fussy. This would be a huge mistake. Thankfully, hair started rising again as the economy tanked, and this can only be a good thing. We have never needed hairdos more than we do right now, and I don't care how it's done. Like karaoke singing, only volume matters.

I am not half-Italian; I am half-New-Jersey-Italian-American. And so if you put me into a Cat scanner you would see that my amygdala (can you see that on a brain machine?) is a platter of cannoli and a can of hairspray.

At the molecular level, my favourite band is either Journey or REO Speedwagon. My genes are acid-washed.

Sadly, I don't speak from much experience. Apart from the teenage mohawk I used to construct with school glue, I have only achieved big hair twice. Once for the pre-wedding salon visit they call the wedding trial, the other the wedding itself.

I took the trial hair for a test-strut into a gale, and let me tell you about the mettle of this thing: it was huge and would not be moved. It wasn't some €200 soft-focus number done with a boatload of 'product'. It was a bona fide, back-combed, hairpin colliery and skull-trophy, solidified with the contents of a four-foot can of the kind of hairspray that could bring on the next apocalypse (and made me a hairdo that would survive it). It cast its own shadow.

First I thought it would be funny to go around hair-butting people and getting them to lay their hands on it or punch it. And then I realised that I didn't even know these people. The sheer size of the hairdo made me believe I could do anything. It made me sashay when I walked, just like those girls from high school. Finally I felt what they felt. Confident. Optimistic.

With my colossal hairdo, I felt that I had reached physical and cosmic equilibrium, even though I'm not sure what that is. It dawned on me that getting me into a T-shirt with an air-brushed wolf on it would probably not take as much convincing as I might have hoped. It was the answer to a question I never thought to ask.

I've tested myself to see if I'm joking, and it turns out I'm not. We can gladly see off the alleged boom years that brought hipster moustaches, ironic T-shirts and complicated haircuts. Irony that made it uncool to care.

Now is not the time for apathy, and big hair is anything but apathetic. Epic, feathered hair with wings and claws, the kind that makes a lady's visage look like a hawk, is about to crash-land on your face -- serious stuff.

When I am done with my coiffure, I will turn the hairspray in irony's face and finish it off.

- Jane Ruffino