Saturday, May 26, 2007

Hair Stories, Part Five

Hair colors I have been:
1. Red
2. Black
3. Blond
4. Frosted
5. Green

After the ordeal with the peroxide, I laid low for a few year. It was more fun to color Soozi's hair pink than meet Mother in the kitchen with her look. But then, one day, the hair dye isle at the drug store beckoned me. This was beyond the henna rinse capsules at the dime store. This was big time!
It took twenty minutes for the coloring. I think I was on the eighteenth minute when mother flung open the door to my bed room. Oh my, it is unprintable. It was a very subtle change in colored. After Mother settled down, she too was dying her hair. The colored photographs from the wedding show the red ends and the dark roots. Hair color has come a long way since then.
I had a friend in Kansas and one night we decided to become blonds for the summer. We did it at home. She had black hair with red tones and I had brown hair with red tones, both equaled carrot colored hair. She dyed hers black and I just kept on bleaching mine until I got it light.
Now, that would have been okay, except fall came and I wanted to go back to natural. I bought brown dye, not thinking about whether or not it was blue or green base and certainly not giving my badly damaged hair any consideration. Of course it came out green. So I bought some more stuff and got that out and dyed it again and got the most beautiful shade of auburn one would ever want. Okay, I have the color I want, now, let's do a permanent.
When you have multiple processes on your hair and then you perm it at home you get...you guessed it, slim and straw. I called in to work telling my supervisor what I had done and that I would be in at half time. I struggled threw the evening. The next morning I went to the shop. She cut off all that she could and gave my wimpy hair a hot treatment and sold me products to make it look healthy until it grew out. And I was no longer going to be a blond, except in a wig.
About ten years ago, I bought a FloBee. I cut bed ridden people's hair with it both in Lawrence and in Fargo. I am NOT bed ridden but I use it myself.
For you see, I am much like my grandmother when she redid her hair after I had done it for her. I go to the shop and come home and finish what they missed.
Is it not true that if Grandma Julia wore rats, and mother used color from the beauty shop, and I colored and permed at home, the next generation is to have extended hair? What will Jaeme do?

Joy to all of you on this marvelous rainy day. Kick back your chair and dream of the perfect hair--which by the way--always seems to be on someone else's head.

e
And for those of you who have never cut your own, colored your own, or permed your own, please wear gloves during coloring, your nails stay much nicer.

2 comments:

ryen.anderson said...

i went to art school, so I went through a bender and changed my hair color every few weeks to get it all out of my system.

hair colors i have been:
NATURAL
bright orange with blond tips
"natural" orange
hot pink
cranberry
turquioise
black
white blonde with dark roots

That was definitely fun to do, but it's way less maintenence to just leave it natural. And let's be honest, nature chooses the right color for your skin tone.

Unknown said...

The first color I ever added (or took away) was via a spray in method called "Sun In." It turned my hair kind of orange but I thought it looked blonde...well, until I saw the old photographs of it. After Sun-In, I used a color called "Golden Blonde--8G" for a long time and sometimes people called me, "Rachel with the Red Hair," although I still always thought of myself as a natural blonde, ha.

I tried adding an ash blonde over the gold and got the green hair...a friend of mom's at secretarial school helped me fix that little green haired situation, and for many years I stuck with either Golden Blonde or any color of blonde that said Neutral.

I have had every oolor and shade of blonde hair and all the colors of shades of brown hair up to medium brown, where I stopped because it was too dark. I have spent hours in the hair color aisle at various stores, deciding which color of hair would change my life the most at the moment.

Now I'm just a tinch lighter than my natural color. The extensions are a mix of dark blonde and light ash brown (so pretty)

I have tons of gray in my natural hair!

Rachel