Directions

All that stuff they tell you you shouldn’t do at home to your hair? I do it. All the time.

I get bored with my natural color (blonde) and experiment with other shades in order to stave off shaving my head – even though Spouse has said it’s okay. It started a couple of years after we were married. I went red (at a salon) and a couple of years later I decided I’d try on brown. I went from a really dark shade to a medium brown with red undertones over the course of a couple of years. Once I found a shade that looked nice, I found a comparable version in the drugstore (usually Feria) and did it myself.

I never had any problems with my hair color. In fact, when I got a new stylist they invariably thought it was my natural color. This is partly because I do that thing they tell you not to on the box: color my eyebrows. At a salon they’re going to charge you $20 for this. I’ve discovered that if I’m careful, I can use the same thing I’m putting on my hair and not blind myself. Go figure.

This is all apropos of last week when I bought I light amber brown hair color. I know better- honestly I do. Anything that’s got reddish tones in it is going to be sucked up by my hair and come out predominantly red. For this reason, I bought a backup color. When I came out looking like Ronald McDonald, I dried it and promptly redoused it with a darker brown dye. I was pretty happy with how the end result looked. Right up until I washed it two days later. Lo and behold, all kinds of red, a lot less brown.

I decided to start over. I got a hair color remover and a darker shade of brown (because I knew all the red wouldn’t come out) and hit the rewind. By the time I got the remover out, my hair was an apricot shade (kind of cool if I didn’t want to have funny looking skintone). I let it dry and then colored it again. It’s back to being a darker shade of auburn (more brown than red) and it lasted through its first wash last night.

I did all these processes within a week. Actually both sets took place within hours, just a few days apart. My hair is just fine – not fried, not falling out, not some hideous lump on my head. Sometimes following the directions is just overrated.