Here I am over the holidays a couple of weeks ago. I’m very overdue for a haircut/color. Fortunately, I’m in a good hair place right now. What does that mean? I have a haircut and color that I’m happy with and a stylist I feel good about to pull it off.

I don’t think I’ve seen my hair au naturel since my mother deemed me old enough to start hitting the hair salon in high school. Left to its own devices, my hair is brown, straight and fine.  I want more “oomph”.

My sister is blonde and I used to want to be too. When I first starting coloring my hair in my teens, I got highlights that grew lighter and lighter until my hair as a whole was a sort of ash blonde.

Thick brown eyebrows with ashy blonde hair weren’t working for me. I couldn’t stand how big they were. So I started tweezing my eyebrows, thinner and thinner until they were two pencil thin lines above my eyes. I’d sit with my magnifying mirror yanking out every errant hair, lying in wait for hairs to sprout up where they didn’t belong. Eventually the hairs stopped growing back. Now thicker brows are more in and my brows are a bit scraggly. So I wind up using a bit of powder to bring back what I tweezed out of existence. Ugh.

I grew bored with blonde hair and threw myself into the red hair color spectrum. Everything from auburn to copper to chestnut, and all of sorts of variations on these shades.  Other times I’d want to go more subtle, or close to my own color. Me, but better. Medium browns, reddish browns, golden browns. This often happened when I was broke and picking up a box from the drug store rather than going to the salon.  Once I made a mistake putting box color over highlights and wound up with black hair. Very black. I tried to convince myself I looked Goth and edgy. I didn’t.

I’ve never been afraid to experiment. For me, it’s a type of self-expression. Other than the black hair, the results haven’t been too horrifying. Hair grows back. Though I’m traumatized to this day by the follicular damage inflicted upon me when I was in high school. Do Lemon Tree Hair Salons still exist? If so, AVOID THEM. AT ALL COSTS. Do perms (body waves) even exist anymore for that matter? I was in high school when I went to the Lemon Tree for my wavy bob haircut. Wavy, not curly, I instructed her, showing her pictures cut out from Seventeen and other teen mags. The hairdresser proceeded to fry the hell out of my hair, cutting off far more of the frazzled ends than I originally wanted in an attempt at damage control. Instead of a wavy bob, I looked like a French poodle with a mullet. The frizzy curls were so tight I could barely run my fingers through them. I cried all weekend at my part time job, and slunk around my high school hallways feeling like everyone was staring at me. It took the school year to grow out. Continue reading →