I’ve been a redhead for a very long time. I’m certain that nature intended me to be one, and just couldn’t quite get the genetics right for the actual hair color. I’ve certainly got the fair skin and firey temprament (which is only a myth, because I’ve known plenty of timid redheads and smart blondes and dumb brunettes, etc., but I digress, as usual).
Many years ago, before I figured out I was meant to be a redhead, I used to color my hair blonde, actually. Didn’t look good on me, as I’m so fair skinned (and I won’t even make a joke about being too smart to be a good blonde, heheh).
So anyway, I’ve been a redhead since 1982 or thereabouts, varying the shade of red, sometimes having kind of strawberry blonde and sometimes really, REALLY red (that was actually a mistake, but it was cool, for the few weeks I had it; I looked very geek punk because of the haircut I had at the time). For the past six years or so, I’ve been coloring it a very dark red, just because that’s what I felt like doing with it.
Lately, I’ve wanted it to be lighter again, just because that’s what I feel like doing with it. I bought a box of a sort of medium light golden brown shade that I thought was suitable and colored the whole thing with that, but only the roots were noticibly lighter. So I got professional advice.
I was advised that the only way to go lighter would be to bleach it, which I already knew (after all, I’d been a blonde for several years), but that doing an “all over” bleach is difficult to get right and fairly bad for your hair (which I also knew, as I used to overprocess my hair shamelessly and managed to turn it into straw for a while when I was bleaching it). I was told that doing it in stages would be the best option, and that I should start with streaking it.
So I did. I got the silly plastic hat with holes all in it and got Andrew to pluck dozens of little pieces of hair through the holes (sometimes at considerable pain to me, oww!). Took ages, was very boring, and when it was finally done I looked silly as hell with a plastic hat and bits of hair sticking out all over, but then we did the bleaching and I sat around looking even MORE stupid for a while (with the bleach on the bits of hair that were sticking out all around my plastic hat), but the end result is very pleasing.
I had thought to do the streaking and then do an all-over coloring to further enhance it, but you know what? I really kinda like it the way it is now. I think I’ll leave it for a few weeks, partly to avoid overprocessing my hair and partly, I just think it looks cool.
I also think it makes me look younger, which is a good thing. I’m not especially vain (I’m hardly vain at all, actually), but it’s never a bad thing to look younger. Unless you’re trying to look older (you know, like a teenager who’s trying to pass for legal drinking age or something).
One thing that the bleaching process reminded me of was the smell of the bleach. Wow, haven’t smelled that in years, but it brought back a lot of memories of… well… bleaching my hair (what else is the smell of hair bleach supposed to remind you of?).
Anyway, here are some pictures I took with the webcam. They’re not great, but you can get the idea, and if you’ve seen previous webcam shots in the column just to the right, you know that my hair is much lighter now than it was just, well, a few hours ago.
And yes, that’s a striped flannel pyjama top I’m wearing. Just in case you wondered. Oh, and you can also see clearly the very seventies haircut I have at the moment, the one I had when I was about fourteen (and which I wrote about in this blog a while back).
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