Color Theory

Today, we bring you another episode of :

But first, we interrupt your program to bring you the following:

Blonde asian is blonde.

I make some strange life decisions.

Wait, what?  All my decisions are strange?  In that case, I guess we return you to your regularly scheduled program.

For those of you who haven't seen me in a while, I did in fact semi-recently dye my hair.  Because my hair is black, I have to bleach it first to strip out the original color before laying the lighter shade on top, leaving me with what you see above.

My actual intent was to dye it red.  "Crimson," actually, is what the bottle said.  What I got was the following:

While it looks sort of streaky there, as my hair was wet, the second it dried, it became a poofy mound of old Big Red bubblegum, which I refuse to show to the Internet.  Needless to say, I felt a bit like this:

Wait - wrong overly romanticized maritime love-at-first-sight story

I ended up having to buy a black dye root kit to take down the brightness.  Fortunately, it was quite salvageable, and my hair now looks... "normal".

Normal is obviously a relative term.  I wasn't born with blazingly red hair (much to my dismay), but these days, people with highlights on dark hair is a pretty common sight, despite some stigma.  Well.  Maybe a lot of stigma.

This is not the first time I've dyed my hair/had it dyed.  Not by a long shot.  In grade school, I tried to color my hair with Kool-Aid more times than I care to count (each of course, a sour disaster since I wasn't privy to the whole bleaching thing).  Anyway, when that didn't work, I moved on to gels and sprays - hair "paints" essentially.  My folks hated the whole idea, and balked each time, but ultimately let me get away with it - only because it was impermanent, and they figured it was just a phase that I would grow out of.

Achieved with eyeshadow and hair gel.

Yup.  Definitely grew out of that one, guys.

My parents had their reasons for disallowing permanent dye - some legitimately good reasons.  First and foremost, coloring your hair is a sign that you have to take a somewhat drastic measure to change your appearance, which means you lacked confidence in the appearance with which you were born.  Second, there's this idea that only less-than-savory characters dye their hair such bold colors, just to get noticed, so it's not very professional.  And, of course - it's just childish, blah blah blah.

I can understand the first two.  True:  I am not my face.  People should like me for how I am, and I shouldn't have to change that to feel comfortable.  But people change how they look, all the time.  Clothes, makeup, haircuts, whatever.  Everyone expresses themselves a certain way.  Sure, those things maybe be less permanent, but you know what?  It's hair color.  It's really not all that permanent.  And hey - if I really don't like the way it looks, I have the option of coloring it again.  MAGIC.

The second reason is harder to dodge because it doesn't involve solely me.  I can't change the way other people view me.  If people think that I am a hooligan because I have red hair, first of all, that's HILARIOUS.  Second of all, yup, guys.  You caught me.  I was incapable of mayhem before, but now that I have donned the proper shade, the world is in a lot of trouble.

Let's be real.  If I was the Little Mermaid, Ursula and I would be bros, and it would end with
tentacle molestation because I just want to watch your childhood burn.

In all seriousness, though, my thoughts on the whole thing can probably be summarized by one of my favorite graphic novels.  These are pages from the manga, Fruits Basket.  To save you the trip to Wikipedia, the premise is that there is a family of hosts for the spirits of the animals of the Lunar Zodiac.  Hosts are born with certain attributes of their animals, i.e., the Bull has white and black spotty hair, the Rat has white hair, etc., etc.  Outsiders often mistake these characteristics as insane dye jobs, as you'll see (dialogue bubbles are read from R to L):

  

The first time that I dyed my hair fuchsia, I was really worried that people on the street would look at me and judge me as being a fool because my hair was unmistakably pink.  But no one said anything, at least not aloud.  Frankly, they probably didn't care all that much, and I slowly learned to stop caring and just enjoy the fact that I really liked the way my hair looked for the first time in a long while.

Clearly I'm still trying to internalize it, but it's getting there.

Until the next.