Hair Adventures
For as long as I have had hair, which is a pretty long time at this point, I have gone through this cycle of growing and cutting. I grow my hair out, get sick of it, and cut it short. Then I miss my long hair, grow it out again, and then get sick of it once more. The circle never ends. I will forever be stuck in this loop of hair cutting. The time has come once again. Today I cut my hair off, but more than that, I attempted to return to my natural hair color. I’ll explain the attempted part when we get to it, but let us start at the beginning, shall we?
My perfect color.
I was meant to be a ginger. I thoroughly believe that I should have been a ginger at birth, but by as a result of our sin-fallen world, I was born with brown hair. Actually, I was born with no hair, but that’s beside the point. Naturally I have brown hair with some red tones here and there. Not enough to call myself a ginger by genetics, unfortunately. So I faked it. Once I was old enough to dye my hair, I started dying it medium auburn and kept dying it for six years now. I am a fake ginger.
The thing about dying your hair is you have to keep up with it, and it’s a pain in the butt. It was fine when I lived with my parents where there’s decent water pressure and I could go to a salon and get it done by a professional and my hair didn’t drip orange for a month afterward. But then I moved out. I got married and moved into an apartment with crappy water pressure that struggles to get my hair clean, let alone wash out copious amounts of excess dye. Driving up to see my favorite beautician was too expensive in both gas and cost and the cheap alternative — having my sister-in-law dye it after church with some store-bought stuff — had mixed results and turned all my towels orange pretty much up to the next time my hair need re-dying. So much work, so much money, so not worth it. I decided it was time to return to my roots, literally.
Last picture as a proper ginger.
So, I worked up the nerve to get my hair chopped off and dye it back to it’s natural color so that it could grow out without looking really tacky. That was the plan anyway. I set the date and went up this morning to join my mom in a joint appointment, as is our custom. I showed my beautician the picture of the cut I wanted and she and her co-worker heartily approved. A quick trim saved her from dying more hair than she had to while leaving room to shape my hair once it was done and a “light brown” dye was applied. Half an hour later I was getting the dye scrubbed from my hair and waiting to see how it turned out.
“Ugh, this red,” I heard my beautician say as she’s cutting my hair. It’s still dark from being wet and I can’t tell in the mirror across the room that it’s still reddish. I’m just happy to finally be free of all that hair! She snips away, giving my hair shape and layers and it just keeps look better. I’m too excited to worry about the color. Then she moves on to my bangs and turns me to the mirror at her station. Still too dark to tell really, and it the cut’s looking really good, so I’m not worried then she dries it. The more she dries, the redder it looks. It’s not the bright auburn it used to be, but it’s definitely got some red in it. So my hair is fighting the change; further proof that I was meant to be a redhead.
Super cute hair with a super cute kitten.
Seriously, though, what was I expecting after years of dying my hair? The solution, it seems is to wait it out a little bit and go back when they’ve found something that will cover better. The goal is to make it as close to my natural hair color as possible so that it doesn’t look bad while growing out. So maybe my hair will be fine as it is. Maybe it’ll take one more time before I’m done with dying. We shall see. It’s all part of the great hair adventure.
So for now I some slightly red-ish brown hair with a super cute cut and I’m okay with that. My head feels so much lighter now that I don’t have all that hair weighing me down and it’s going to be so much easier to deal with. I can’t wait to wash it and scrunch it to see what it looks like with my natural wave. It got straightened today what with the blow-drying and all, which is a valid option, but most likely I’ll be scrunching it more often than not. It’ll be grand, I’m sure.
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