Cabin Fever

Who cares if it's cold and rainy, time to get my *color refreshed!

The bright streak in front is really fuschia, the camera just shows it as really bright red.

Unlike most other alternative kids who came of age in the eighties, I never did much experimenting with permanent hair dye. I mostly played around with semi-permanent solutions that were woefully ineffective on my dark hair.

In middle school, I owned two types of mousse that were supposed to dye your hair purple and red. You could barely see them on my hair.

Not even if you put a lot on.

A little later in middle school, I worked up the nerve to bleach out two locks of hair. Woo woo.

Then, I dated the Cape Cod equivalent of a redneck and took on his values and it never occured to me to dye my hair weird colors, even though I admired them on other people.

Then I went to college and started meeting more interesting people than the redneck. Then I started working as an exotic dancer (the redneck would've flipped) and doing anything too weird to my hair was out. Bad for business.

I did get part of it shaved though. The rest of my hair mostly covered it up. I still have my old student ID with my partially shaved head.

I went through a natural phase and dabbled in henna. Black henna. It didn't really blacken my hair, it left a greeny black tinge. And it made a godawful mess and took hours.

That turned me off hair dying for approximately seven years.

The spell was broken when a friend gave me a red semi-permanent dye job. It looked a bit unfortunate. People go grey early in my family and everyone at family gatherings assumed that it was a "cover up the grey" dye job.

I quit working as a dancer, but I got nagged for the longest time into keeping the long hair. Then, the time was right and I went to an absolutely wonderful Iranian woman who cut my hair brillantly super-short and gave me beautiful blonde highlights. It was the most amazing, transformative haircut I've ever had.

I've let it go and I've kept it up, but I've always had some sort of color in my hair ever since.

*P.S. I am really tired in this picture. Even my nose looks tired. I fell asleep at the hairdressers while I was lying back and waiting for the fuschia streaks to take. I dreamed that my hair was wet after taking a shower and I remember thinking in the dream that I had to go up and get a towel out of the linen closet and then I woke up.