my hair has always been the bane of my existence. it is baby fine which makes it hard to work with. it has been short, shorter, ridiculously short, medium length, and now finally long. it has been layered, blunt cut, permed, spiral permed, and colored red. yes, red.
i have always loved red hair. so when i was about 30, with the encouragement of my current best friend, i decided to give it a try. even though i knew gazillions of women colored their own hair, i had absolutely zero experience with it. and since i was thinking about such a drastic change, i thought maybe i should get some professional help. (my mom was not a fan of my red hair. she probably thought i should have gotten some professional help before i changed the color!)
the problem was, i didn't have a lot of extra cash just lying around waiting to throw itself at a hair coloring specialist. so i did the only thing i could think of--i went to a beauty school!
i thought this was a great solution. because even though these budding hair stylists needed guinea pigs, i was pretty sure they would be supervised by fairly competent instructors. wouldn't they? i was pretty sure they would. however, i didn't actually see any competent instructors. or incompetent ones. or any instructors at all! this made me a little uneasy, but i convinced myself that there must be some instructors somewhere who would be monitoring this procedure. surely they wouldn't leave my hair to the mercy of some untested trainee. would they?
apparently they would. apparently all the instructors were at lunch. or home sick. or in the back watching soap operas. but they were very definitely not checking up on my procedure.
i chose a color--without any help at all. the beauty school student mixed it up, and started applying it to my hair. i thought the solution looked kind of purple. i said, "that looks sort of purple to me. are you sure that is the right color?" the beauty student looked at it and said, "no, that is what it is supposed to look like." ok, well, i had never seen hair color before. maybe it was supposed to be the color of an eggplant...
i left a couple of hours later with burgundy hair. yes, burgundy.
i cried. it was awful! and i had no idea what to do. i just thought i was going to have burgundy hair until it had grown enough to be burgundy hair with long brown roots. i thought it would probably take two to three years to completely grow back out!
this was not a workable solution, in my opinion.
thankfully(?) i had a friend who had vast experience with hair coloring. yes, this is the same friend who encouraged me to go red in the first place, but apparently i was still listening to her. she said all i had to do was go to the store, buy a box of color stripper to take off the horrible burgundy color, and then recolor it myself. she proceeded to explain how to do this, but i was still kind of wrapping my brain around the fact that you could buy a solution to strip all the color off of your hair!! it sounded so drastic! but something had to be done. burgundy hair was not a look i was willing to live with. so off i went to payless...
i came home and immediately applied the stripping formula to my hair. i didn't really know what to expect, but i think i sort of thought my hair would be kind of platinum colored. isn't that what hair would look like without any color to it? again, apparently not. because when i was done stripping the color, my hair was streaked in several shades of bright red to white. it was a mess!
now i was really worried. things were going from bad to worse! i was starting to think i might have to cut my hair really, really short and wear a wig!
about this time, four-year old diandra came out of her room. "oh mommy," she said, "your hair looks so pretty!" aww, you are probably thinking, how sweet! and it was. it made me smile on a day when tears ruled.
but then i remembered how much she loved rainbow brite.
i managed to get some color on my hair--a lovely shade of red--and it turned out pretty nice. i liked it a lot. but i quickly found out that it was going to take a lot of maintenance to keep that red color looking so good. so after a few months, i went back to my normal color of brown, even though i did love the red...
...anyway, back to today. the reason my hair is driving me crazy today is not the color--it is the length! my hair has never been this long before. i didn't set out to grow it this long, it is simply the result of inattention--if you don't cut it, hair continues to grow. (i know, rocket science...) i think it is too long. i think it makes my face look horsey. but every time i talk about getting it cut, diandra and rollie go on and on about how much they like it. which is nice, but it just feels too long for me.
i admit it. i have sensory issues. i can live with the way it looks, and even the horsey face, but i cannot live with the way it feels. even when i think it looks pretty good, it feels like it is just hanging there, limply. (i am sure this is a flashback to my high school years when it did hang limply.) and so, i think i am going to have to cut it.
the only remaining question is, how short. i long for a shortish, flippy cut that will blow in the wind when i am driving and stay out of my face when i am sleeping. but then i think how nice it is to be able to gather all my hair up into a ponytail when it is really hot, and get it up off of my neck. and so i think for now, the ponytail trumps the flippy cut. maybe i will just get a couple of inches trimmed off, and see how i like that.
i wonder if there is a beauty school anywhere around here...
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