Blonde ambition

Over the past eight years I've devoted at least one full week's worth of hours to sitting in a stylist's chair with foil exploding out of my head in an effort to look like a natural blonde. In those eight years I've only ever trusted two women to match my hair color to my skin tone and to not kick me out of the salon with roots that resemble the American flag. I've paid these women thousands of dollars just so I'd never find out how lackluster brown my hair actually is. And in a single moment of pure insanity on Sunday when my roots were particularly obvious, I decided to leave the fate of my towhead up to a $10 box of L'Oreal Superior Preference hair color.

On Sunday night I said to myself, "Sure, it's a lot less white-blonde than I'm used to and there aren't any contrasting brown streaks in it anymore, but at least the top part matches the bottom now." But when I looked in the mirror on Monday morning I thought, "Oh dear God, my head looks like the foil wrapper on a chocolate coin!" and within five minutes I was in the shower attempting to scrub the fresh color out with body wash.

No one said anything about it in class on Tuesday, so I thought the fact that no one was mentioning it was a sign that the change wasn't terribly obvious. Then I made the mistake of mentioning to a collegue that I though I'd accidentally made my hair a little too yellow and she said, "Oh yeah, I noticed that you dyed it." But she thought it best not to say anything? Nice. My brother responded similarly ("Yeah, I thought it looked kind of brighter and a little more yellow"). Double nice. Now I've got to face my sweet stylist/friend/former employer who will surely (albeit gently) chastise me for thinking I could wrangle my own hair. Kim, if you can keep my head from looking like a bright yellow highlighter in all of my Spring Break pictures, I promise to never pay less than $100 for hair color EVER again.