Blondes Really Do Have More Fun

Sometime in April I was feeling particularly unsettled. I was in definite need of a change and, since I wasn’t doing such a great job with changing my weight, I decided to change my hair. My natural color is somewhere around a medium to dark blonde. I usually have some subtle highlights put into it and I’ve never really considered myself anything other than a blonde. I wanted a big modification; I wanted to go dark. Not just brown… I’m talking black… Elvira black. My stylist has been my good friend for about 23 years; we went to high school together and she’s done my hair since she was in cosmetology school in the early ‘90s. Oh, by the way… she has naturally black, gorgeous, thick hair. Our initial go at it produced a really dark brown and we decided to cut several inches off of at the same time. I was being told that I had beautiful green eyes by about everybody who saw me like they were just noticing them for the first time. I guess the darker color really brought them out. I liked it, I liked it a lot… but I didn’t feel it was dark enough. At our next coloring session a few months later, I talked her into going as dark as she could. That was the color you see in my profile picture. I loved it! The reviews were mixed. My husband, though he never came out and said he didn’t like it, would always point out how good I looked in pictures where my hair wasn’t dark. My daughters didn’t mince words and told me flat out that they didn’t care for it and my 5 year old simply said, “Mom, you have to go blonde again!” The problem with coloring your hair dark, is that it doesn’t seem to stay that color for very long. Red starts showing through and it quickly became a color I hadn’t wanted. On top of that, I didn’t feel like myself. I’m not sure how to explain it, but when I looked in the mirror, I didn’t see myself. Maybe that was what I was looking for when I originally decided to pull this stunt… but I think it kind of backfired. I know there were several other things at play but let’s just say that the biggest jump in my weight gain came between April and now. Very telling.

Now that I want to “find” myself again, I decided I have to go back to my natural color (or somewhere close to it anyway). Unfortunately, going dark is a lot easier than returning to light. I wasn’t blessed with thick lustrous hair. My hair is thin, super-fine, and delicate… not a good combination when the only way to go back to blonde in one shebang is to strip my hair of the color. That was not an option for me according to my hairdresser. Instead, we put loads of highlights in it and then another, semi-permanent honey color on top to tone them down against the dark. It’s going to be a gradual process, getting back to blonde, but I sincerely believe I need to be as close to the “old” me as possible right now.