I’m not afraid to admit that I pluck out grey hairs. When I get in the mood to hunt them down it’s like a search and destroy mission. That usually only happens when my roots have gotten dark enough for the silver shards of old age to become visible even with my glasses off. I am far too young at heart to allow the grey to take over so I color my hair. A few years back when we went on a budget, one of the luxuries to go was my professionally done highlights. I made the sacrifice and began to color my own hair. I reasoned that the $7 box of color was much more economical than the cost of having the hairdresser do it. I would give up the highlights, but I would reap the savings, in theory anyway. However, when someone has to color and recolor her hair several times, the savings quickly dwindles. My natural hair color is dark brown. My natural skin color is Elmer’s paste. The highlights went well with my skin tone. Unfortunately I have not been able to find a box color that comes close to what Lisa was able to accomplish in 1 hour every 8 weeks. When I covered my beloved highlights I started with “medium brown”. I don’t know the difference between warm, caramel, natural, or ash brown. But from what I have discovered in my bathroom chemistry lessons is that ash is the only brown that actually turns my hair brown. The rest have resulted in a Lucille Ball meets golden retriever orange. The medium ash brown was a little too dark and did nothing for my skin tone, so I experimented with all of the varieties of light brown, each one resulting in the same shade of orange. I tried putting highlights on the medium brown and they were orange. Last summer, I decided to just forget the light colors and experimented with dark brown, rationalizing that if it matched my roots then I wouldn’t have roots. That was just a disaster. I looked like Morticia Addams. I had to strip all of the color out of my hair and re-dye it. It’s a wonder my hair isn’t the texture of straw. The last time I dyed my hair I found a new color, which was in the light brown family, but had a nice warm tone to it. For the first time in 2 years I had finally found a color that I liked. Of course I didn’t save the number so I had to rely on my failing memory to find it again. I came across light caramel warm brown. That sounded about right. I left it on the full 45 minutes to be sure that my extremely dark roots wouldn’t turn orange. But upon final rinse, that familiar tone taunted me in the mirror. My husband jokingly commented to our golden retriever, “Now you look like Mommy!” When will I get it right? When the economy makes its anticipated turn-around, I’ll happily skip into my hairdresser for my beautiful coffee-with-cream highlights. Until then I will return to the store and grab old-faithful, medium ash brown, and wash that grey right out of my hair.
Published April, 2011
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