Last week, I dyed my hair "darkest brown". It shall be added to my list of things that happen as my body starts to decay, along with polyp removal and buying shoes with arch support. Technically, it's not the first time I've taken a cheap box of hair dye to my locks--because there was that time in High School when, straight off of 6 years of tight perms, I thought it would be *awesome* to dye my hair red. In my defense, this was a particular period of time when all of my Asian friends were adding blond highlights, and collectively we were very, very unnatural looking, with me being a half-white girl, pretending to be an Asian girl, pretending to be a full-white girl--and that is not a look that I can pull off.
I've been finding white hair. A lot of them. I waited patiently for a couple of years, thinking that the universe was just f-ing with me, but son of a bitch, it turns out that I am NOT perpetually 23-years-old. This time around, I went with a dark brown color that was VERY CLOSE to my natural hair, maybe just a shade darker (verses three spins on the other side of the color wheel). I mixed up the potion, and then I attempted to apply it to my hair the way the woman on the instructions did it--except that she is full of sh#!, as it is impossible to dye my hair in neatly spaced, quarter-inch sections. Here is where I *may* have panicked.
So I'm doing this whole scalp stripe thing (like it says), and it hits me that I am NOT reaching the back of my head, nor the very long tips of my hair. As this goes totally against the entire point of this exercise, I just started globbing hair dye everywhere and working it in. I mean, REALLY rubbing it in there--which coincidentally results in a sort of tangled birds nest type of effect. I'm trying to get it everywhere, but I have A LOT of really long hair, and holy sh#!, it's starting to look black, and there are large dots of dye freckles all over my face. The instructions tell me to wipe these off in a timely matter with a wet towel, and my DYE SOAKED rubber gloves--and let me just go ahead and tell you that all of a sudden, those white hairs were the least of my problems, because I was inadvertently dying my face a very blotchy shade of gray, and I don't think that's gonna fly in carpool. I REALLY wanted to take a picture of what was happening, with my face and my hair, and my bathroom that looked like a Jackson Pollock painting; but EVERYTHING that I touched was being stained "darkest brown", and apparently, I touch A LOT of things.
Also, I kind of assumed I was supposed to use all the hair color--mostly because I paid $7 for it, and I want to make that crap worth it, you know? And then, when it was all said and done and tangled, I pulled off my gloves and had to think about NOT TOUCHING ANYTHING with my head for 25 minutes, which is coincidentally very difficult, and sheds new light on the lice epidemic in grade schools. I settled in on our ottoman, at what was probably the MOST boring 25 minutes I've ever spent on Facebook--thanks for NOTHING, friends.
Twenty-five minutes later? The instructions told me to add a little warm water and work the dye up to a lather; of course, I did this with my eyes closed, because HELLO, my eyeballs were the only things that were still white at this point, and I was trying to retain just a little bit of my natural skin tone and dignity. Seriously, HOW did I pull this off when I was a teenager, without looking like I was a part of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Because after I "lathered" up the hair dye and began to rinse it clean? It was EVERYWHERE. You would have thought I was whipping my hair around while hosing myself off in a wet t-shirt contest--instead of trying not to drown in my shower, while keeping my eyes and mouth firmly clenched.
Forty-five minutes later, after the water from my shower had run (mostly) clear, and I had exfoliated the top layer of my skin right off, and the walls of the bathroom were scrubbed and bleached-- I dried my new hair. It's a little darker than my natural color, and I *think* I can tell this because there are sections of old hair that seem to contrast the new darker hair. I think. But I'm not sure.
WHAT DID I LOOK LIKE BEFORE I DID THIS?????? I can't remember. Which means I'm not really sure if I should panic or go on with life. Still deciding, actually.
So now, whenever I walk in front of a mirror, I SWEAR that I am seeing a combination of my natural brown hair, with my fake darkest-brown hair, and I'm all kinds of paranoid that I look like a really subtle skunk. And the image of me just globbing hair dye in a willy-nilly pattern on my head (which seemed like such a good idea) now has me worried that the back of my head looks like some sort of tone-on-tone maze--because you CANNOT SEE the back of your head, and this is a major design flaw when it comes to hair dye.
My plan was simply to base all of my hope and self worth on whether or not Mike noticed when he got home that evening, and to deal with it (inappropriately) at that time. I gave him about 2 hours to notice my hair, and when he didn't I played the "Do-you-notice-something-different-about-me" game, which is always very dangerous and ball-busting. Except it wasn't a trick question, and I REALLY needed to know if he noticed anything, and if I DID look different, because I honestly couldn't remember. I told him I dyed my hair, and he *thinks* it looks a little darker, which is good, because the point here is to be exactly the same but without white hair, if I could remember what "exactly the same" looked like. He agreed that there were two tones of hair, but that this lended to the overall, natural look; I just wouldn't put it past him NOT to notice that I had inadvertently dyed the words "I love Justin Bieber" into my hair while I was going rogue with the dye bottle. No one has said anything to me at the grocery store, or church--but if I accidentally dyed Sponge Bob's likeness into my hair, people would probably think I did it on purpose, and what do you say about that? Exactly. Also, no one at the kids' school has mentioned it, however, yesterday was the Halloween parade/party, and I wore these ENORMOUS, fake rhinestone eyelashes, which seemed like a fun idea, until I realized that, a.) glue hurts when it gets in your eyes, and b.) eyelids are not meant to carry that kind of "weight". So ultimately, my blood-shot, blinking eyes made me look like a hooker on crack, and under those circumstances, my dye job was the least of my worries.
Which, I guess, is perspective for ya.
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