so i woke up yesterday with two goals in mind... to drive to marietta and take care of my cat (simple but time consuming)... and to color my hair something different (not so simple and much more time consuming)...
to begin with, i used to be something of a hair coloring buff, starting with my first foray in 9th grade where laura, robyn and i got a lot of kool-aid and started dipping our heads in it. while it smelled good and offered a wide array of color choices (cherry, grape, lemon-lime, strawberry, etc) it wasn't very permanent and had the bad side effect of bleeding onto pillows, towels, couches or whatever else you put your head against. after that we went more permanent, making our first trips to sally's beauty supply to get brushes, gloves, and all sorts of crazy chemicals to put in our hair. after awhile i focused in on color's such as redwood and got pretty good at highlighting my own hair on a regular basis. i remember my mother at church talking to her friends as if i wasn't two feet away and deaf... well, yes, the pink is a bit out there... but i told her if she keeps making A's she can do whatever she wants...
well, i got to college and continued to experiment with colors but stuck mostly with "normal" hair colors that nonetheless would combine in layers on my head to create some pretty weird shades. i had a burgundy once that interacted with whatever i put it over to come out a wine-colored purple... i loved it of course. i even got into dying other people's hair. i loved messing with my sister's hair (she had very blonde hair... a perfect canvas) but my parents put their foot down when they caught me trying to put blue streaks in it. one friend in college asked me to leopard print his head. after we bleached it almost white we used two different shades of brown to put the spots and their outlines on his head... it was pretty awesome...
so all this went on for quite some time until one day i was sitting there and i suddenly realized... i have no idea what my natural hair color is. curiousity got the best of me and i went almost two years without dying my hair, letting it grow out and getting all the "unnatural" color cut off. lo and behold, i had brown hair. and not even a good, rich brown... but dirty blonde, muted brown hair. very boring. but after all that effort i was fine with just leaving it be and have done that for quite some time now.
every time i am out at a drugstore and have some extra money to spend though, i pick up hair dye thinking... i'll do this some time. by now i've collected a few different colors and some highlighting kits so yesterday was the day to try them out. i had the option between dying it brown (yawn) or going with highlights... highlights seemed more dramatic so i went with that. it was this kit that has a wand, which they liken in the instructions to a mascara wand... you just dip the wand in the white goop and run it through strands of hair, just like putting on makeup. sounds foolproof enough, right?
well, i was getting along kind of dodgily, realizing that it wasn't as easy as putting on mascara as each minute ticked by. the thing is that your eyelashes are all in a relatively straight line, and there are drastically less of them than hair on your head. as i got the brush tangled in my hair for the third time i began to wish i had barbie like plugs of hair, perfectly laid out in rows that would be easy to sort through... just count two plugs back, goop up with wand, two more back, goop again... except then i'd have a very ben affleck hair plugged look and that wouldn't be too attractive either. so i got it all on and waited the prescribed 15 minutes, washed it out and blow dryed it to find... not much of a change. an hour after i started i was standing there with slightly lighter streaks of hair and a very frustrated look on my face.
yes, the highlights looked natural. in fact, it looked like i just spent a few days at the beach or something. but it really wasn't the effect i was going for, and after looking at it for a few minutes i decided lighter wasn't the way to go at all... so back to brown it was. i reached into my inventory and pulled out something browner and went to work. another set of gloves, more smelly chemicals, but thankfully no goopy white stuff or wands. and hour and fifteen minutes later i stepped out of the shower, blowed dryed my hair, and looked in the mirror...
*sigh* almost three hours and two kits later, i have hair that is maybe three shades darker than what i started with. and still just brown. but the highlights i had put in an hour earlier do keep it from being a flat brown, and the darker color actually looks a ton better than the lighter color. oddly enough, it seems more... sensible. i don't know how else to explain it...
so anyway, it was something to do for an afternoon even though i kinda of ended up where i started... such is life...
