Chronicles of a Quarter-Life Crisis: Impulsive Hair Disorder

I have a problem.

I am addicted to changing my hair.  It is a problem that I have dealt with for years, but I feel I must come clean.  On the plus side, I may have also found a way to kick my habit.

It started out somewhat innocently.  Back in grade school, I had pretty long hair, but my mom noticed that I almost never wore it down.  It wasn't that I enjoyed styling it or even playing with it.  I couldn't be bothered by that kind of noise.  I always just kept it back in a ponytail or a braid to keep it out of my face.  So, being the practical woman she was, she suggested that I get it cut.

Life was never the same.

I kept my hair short for ages after that.  Sometimes I'd wonder what my hair would look like if I let it go to my shoulders, let it grow an inch or two, but quite soon after, I'd get fed up and chop my locks again.  Sometimes I'd use an excuse like life changes as a reason to go even shorter - breaking up with boyfriends, taking on a new project, moving to school, etc.

But honestly, a lot of these decisions are made on a whim.  Yes, a lot of it is expressing my overall current demeanor through my hair, but I also just get incredibly bored with the way my hair looks, all the time.  I'll glance in a mirror one day and decide to walk into a salon that afternoon, sit down, zip through a few pictures on Pinterest, and let the stylist have at it.  As indecisive as I usually am, my hair is not one of the things I hem and haw over.

Unsurprisingly, this gets me into trouble sometimes.  I have gotten some unruly nearly-pixie cuts in my time, few of them flattering (most of them not).  Some people look great with super short hair.  I am not blessed with this good fortune, but I was too busy trying to "figure myself out" to accept it.

In conjunction with this, I often try to color my hair.  We talked about this last year with the whole highlight fiasco.  You think I would have learned my lesson then, but no.

Around November of last year, I decided that I really missed my red hair, but that I also did not have the patience to wrap strands in individual foils again for highlights.  I was going to go the whole nine yards and dye my entire head.

Before

During (blonde asian is blonde.)

After

Yikes.

I think I stayed up until midnight, just staring at my head in a mirror, trying to figure out what I had done to myself.  I actually couldn't decide for the first few days whether I liked it or not.  I had wanted my hair to be a dark copper, but it turned out more pink. Maybe as a result of that, instead of it making feel empowered, I just felt kind of juvenile.

Unfortunately, this wasn't a thing I could really hide.  The thing about whims is that they strike whenever they damn well choose, and this whim had struck on a Tuesday night.  I contemplated hiding my hair under a hat or a bandanna at work, but ultimately decided that that was a stupid idea (and also, I didn't have any hats that I liked.)

My boss was the very first person to notice.  He definitely took it... in stride.

I wore it around the office for a little bit, and while a number of people were shocked, no one was appalled.  So, I let it be for about a month, having love/hate feelings for it.  But by the time December rolled around, I was already bored of it.  I wanted it to stay red, but a much darker shade.  So, I bought a box of drugstore dye and...

HELLO, PURPLE.

For the record, this was the color on the dye box:

Right.  "Burgundy".

So that happened.  I kind of looked at it and shrugged.  It wasn't what I wanted, but I was too lazy to buy another box of color to attempt to fix it, and violet certainly is not a color I've had my hair be before.

And it has pretty much been that shade until last week when my roots were too visible to be left uncovered.  Back to black.

So what have I learned from this excursion?

1. Bleach really f***s up your hair if you aren't careful.  My hair wouldn't hold moisture for almost two months unless I slathered it in conditioner.  Even DG thought it felt gummy and brittle.  I'm really not an expert in hair care, and there are a number of people in the blogging world more qualified than I to discuss the issue -- I recommend The Dainty Squid for extreme hair coloring.
2. The color on drugstore dyes is a damnable lie.
3. I think I've calmed down a bit on the coloring front for awhile.  Maybe even on the hair cutting thing, too.  I've been letting my hair grow out for more than 6 months now, and I'm finding that, now that I'm older, I might actually take a liking to styling my hair.   

Uh...

I... admittedly might be out of practice on that front.  We'll see how that pans out.

'Til the next.