The whole point of the test was to help get guys to start having "girl approved hair". In other words, not simply running out of the house with wet hair, or sliding some gel through it. Women, it turns out, want a guy who takes pride in his appearance. (It helps if he's good-looking, smart, funny, and nice. But yeah, nice hair works too.) I figured I had this in the bag. While my personality is on par with a car alarm at 3 in the morning, and I'm about as nice as a sunburn, my hair is always well-coifed. Several of the organizers remarked that my hair was already girl-approved, but they handed me a drink and took me through the stations anyway.

First stop was shampoo and conditioning and a head massage. The long and the short of it is, getting my head massaged is equivalent to taking a Xanax with a slug of Vodka. It's Elysium. It's better than the after-glow from sex. And when it's done well, it's like watching the Mona Lisa get painted. Last night, it was done very well. At one point, I forgot I was in a salon, and imagined myself floating in a warm sea watching dolphins jump over my body while my dead relatives (looking very un-dead) swam up and gave me hugs. It's these head massages that made me fall in love with my regular stylist.

I had my choice of shampoo, and was rather hesitant to pick as I took the stereotypical bent on AXE and figured my hair would smell like a 1991 middle school dance, replete with Drakkar Noir and Cool Water. My shampooist insisted that they were all very mild (they were) and recommended I pick not off of smell but of type. I went with the "Un-Glue" as it's advised for men whose hair has more product in it than a Wal-Mart.

The thing about massages is they never last. I spend 10% of the time enjoying it and the other 90% thinking about how this great feeling is going to end. It could have been the (several at this point) drinks I had in me, or the technique. But all I could think about was not only how great it was and my dead-relatives in the ocean hallucination, but also that I needed to get my girlfriend to come down and take some lessons from the masseuse.

After the massage, I met with Diana Schmidtke, who styles George Clooney and Matt Damon's hair. She gave me some styling recommendations using AXE's new hair sculpting products. And, again, they didn't smell bad. I really wanted them to so I could make fun of them in this blog, but they're really pleasant. In fact, my usual sculpting wax has a much more pungent smell than the AXE products.

Diana gave me a "girl approved" hair style, and in the process changed my part to the other side of my head. Which, honestly, was pretty badass. I hadn't changed my part since 1987 and thought it would be hard to walk with my weight balance thrown off. Actually, it was hard to walk because my blood alcohol level was approaching the average of my last family reunion. The night continued, I talked with some of the AXE girls (who are always cute, it must be a requirement), ate, drank some more, and eventually stumbled into a car home. (I had a driver, don't worry.)

And this would be a picture of me, post-event, standing in my bathroom. Thanks to Carlee, Leslie, and Jake for setting this up.