Cancer survivor's wedding wish: hair today
For more than six hours, hair stylist Angeline El Moussa painstakingly applied 20-inch-long extensions to Amanda Twellman's honey-highlighted chestnut hair, which over the past eight months had barely grown to her collar.
"I don't want to look because I might cry," said Twellman, 21, her head buried in a Modern Bride magazine as El Moussa toiled with an assistant, Nicole Slater, earlier this month.
Twellman's day at Salon Luca Bella was about more than getting dolled up for her wedding. It was about going back to before that horrible day in November 1998 when doctors found a tumor the size of a submarine sandwich lodged behind her heart.
"She didn't understand what chemotherapy was, at first," said Twellman's mother, Linda. "It hit her when they told her her hair would come out."
Amanda would lose her hair twice over the next five years during an aggressive and grueling fight against Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer that attacks the immune system. At one unimaginable point, she recalled vomiting every 10 minutes for three to five days.
"It's something that you don't give up on," Twellman said of her excruciating fight, which included experimental gene therapy and two stem-cell transplants.
Twellman's cancer returned in June 2002 after being in remission for three years. In late April, a doctor declared her cancer-free. She is waiting for doctor clearance to resume a favorite activity, surfing. She had to give up running because of severely weakened lungs, but is otherwise healthy.
Twellman knows it sounds sort of ridiculous discussing hair extensions when she nearly died twice. She knows that her family and her faith are what matter, not how she looks.
"Don't worry," her fiancé, Aaron Dieppa, 23, tells her. "You are beautiful either way."
But Twellman doesn't feel like herself with short hair. "When I lost (my hair), I was devastated," she said. "To me, I equate long hair with femininity. And every woman wants to feel feminine on her wedding day."
Enter Modern Bride magazine.
Twellman was flipping through it at the gym in late August when she decided to write and ask for help. The magazine did makeovers for brides-to-be, and Twellman thought she had a good story.
She was right. Editors of the New York-based magazine were brought to tears.
The magazine partnered with Great Lengths, a provider of high-end hair extensions favored by celebrities such as Jennifer Aniston and Britney Spears, to pay for Twellman's $2,000-plus treatment. A Modern Bride crew recorded the makeover for a future story.
The hair is real. It comes from India, where many women cut their hair before getting married as a sign of sacrifice, El Moussa said. The hair, colored with a textile dye, is bonded to Twellman's locks near the roots by a heated, protein-based solution. The extensions last up to five months.
At the end of the day, Twellman tried on strapless bridal gowns. She teared up when she looked in the mirror.
"Wanting to have long hair may sound frivolous," said her mother. "But when you think about it, nothing's frivolous about wanting to be normal.
"A lot of people don't understand: Normal, everyday life is such a blessing."