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| Hair, it grows on you! |
Well, I can now admit that my hair has become the center of my universe. It's practically all I think about, Google about, Pinterest and YouTube about. And not just hair, but grey hair. Yes, I have decided to jump off the diving board of vanity and dive head first into the latest craze, going grey.
When I was 15 years old, a friend saw and yanked a half grey, half brown hair off my head. That wasn't the beginning of my ascent into a head full of grey, it was just a weird anomaly. I can't really say when I started to really notice the silver hairs peeking through the browns, probably in my mid-to-late-thirties? I started covering the nasty intruders with Natural Instincts, because it's perfectly instinctive to color up grey hair, isn't it? While it may be instinctive, it's not natural, and I was never good at all with the coloring process. Hair color on the walls, hair color on the floor, hair color on the toilet seat, it seemed the color went everywhere it wasn't supposed to. I'd have the best intentions of just covering the roots like the instructions recommend, but once I got that pair of cheap plastic gloves on my hands and the chemicals filled the bathroom, I would just say forget this and I'd empty all the contents all over my head. And the floor, and the walls and the toilet.
This has gone on for years, except for the times my friend and sometimes stylist, who is really good with color, would convince me to get my color done by someone who knows better than to get it all over the walls. This involved lots of time sitting in the salon, piles and piles of foil pieces, time under the dryer, more sitting, and after feeling like a drowned rat, emerging from the salon with lovely color. And a depleted budget. But what cute color!
Until it grew back.
And hair never grows faster than when you love the cut or you love the color. If you love both, don't blink because hair then goes into speed growing mode, and before you can say "Oh this color? It's just kissed by the sun" those grey roots start rearing their ugliness and ruining whatever social event you've got planned that involves showing your head.
So then comes the decision, do I go back and get more professionally done color, or do I slink into the aisle of the store and try to pick out the color that comes within hopefully ten shades of what my hair color was when I was five. Buy the box, hope it looks halfway OK, undo all the work done with foils by the expert, more drips on the floor, and walls and toilet. I probably went with the at-home process 95% of the time.
I had no intension of changing the status quo. In fact, when I picked out the color of my Baha hearing device that I wear attached my head, my choices were grey, blond, black, brown and reddish brown. I went with reddish brown, because that's my hair color, right? When I exchanged one of them for a smaller model, the audiologist chose black without asking me, and commented that black goes with everything. Little did I know how much I would appreciate her choice.
A few months ago a friend we had known in Tahoe posted on Instagram that she was "ditching the dye, going grey." I was shocked! Just like I was shocked that another friend from Tahoe had done the same thing the year before. My thought was, "More power to you sisters, but no way, not for me!"
I sort of put off the decision by saying "Maybe I'll go grey when I'm sixty."
After getting my hair colored at the salon in summer, and seeing how fast the grey came back, especially at my temples, and following it up with a bad box color that seemed to just look flat and blah, I started seriously rethinking my no-way-on-the-grey. I did one more box color which according to the receipt was November 9, 2018. About a month later I decided for sure to let my roots come in and see what happens.
What is happening is not what I expected. I assumed I was completely grey all over. I'm not, and the color of my roots in back is cracking me up. Dark brown, a color of hair I associate with my Mom as a young woman. Brunette, without a hint of warmth. It's totally neutral, and if it comes in like this I may have to rethink half of my wardrobe.
I had some highlights put in to help with the dreaded "line of demarcation." I sort of wish I had bitten the bullet and just gone without this step, but the lighter color is helping me get used to the bigger changes ahead. A friend of ours who is very daring with her tresses, whose hair may or may not have been pink just a few weeks ago, saw my hair and said she loved the "Ombre Look." I'm going to close my eyes and accept that as a compliment.
As much as I didn't want my hair to grow fast after a coloring, either from a box or the salon, it's the opposite now. I want my roots to grow, I want more grey, more natural color to see what I've been covering up all these years. If I believed it would help, I'd take hair growth supplements. But this is a time for good old fashioned patience, something I am in short supply of. If only I had as much patience as I have grey hair.
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| Summer convention, grey is peeking out! |
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| Plunked down some money to get it colored right. But it grew. Stupid roots, stop growing! |
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| So I box colored it again. Cheaper, but blah. |
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| The day I decided to ditch the dye. |
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| Faded and dark auburn/brown, blond highlights, grey roots, dark roots I can't wait to find out who I am. To Pixie or Not to Pixie, That is the Question. |
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| Feeling pretty good about the future. |
