Where did you get that hair???
A couple of weeks ago I found myself at a new hairdresser, having my hair blown out. I do this perhaps twice a year, when I have a special event, and get my hair cut even less, because I am spectacularly lazy when it comes to grooming, and spectacularly impulsive. This means I do not like to plan ahead. If I wake up in the morning with a sudden compulsion to get my hair cut, I will phone every hairdresser in town until I find one that's free. Frankly, I'm surprised I don't just walk down Main Street asking if anyone knows how to cut hair, but you never know, that day may come.
The girl blowing out my hair suddenly asked where I got my color done. Presuming she was about to attempt to sell me the services of their colorist, I told her I'd been with the same man for years, gave her his name, where he worked, and told her he was wonderful.
She said nothing. I then realised this was because he didn't actually do my last touch-up. No. I woke up in the morning, decided my roots were now far too obvious, and decided to do it myself (I quickly confessed, so she didn't spend the rest of her life thinking that X at XX is the WORST COLORIST IN THE WHOLE WORLD).
Because - oh reader, I am ashamed to admit this - I didn't use l'Oreal, or Clairol, or anything that you're supposed to use. This is mainly because I am very allergic to hair dye and they make me nervous. I used what I used to use as a fourteen-year-old who raided her mother's bathroom cabinet when she decided she absolutely, positively, couldn't live without blonde streaks in her hair for another second.
Deep breath...
I used Jolen Cream Bleach.
Yes, that's right. The stuff you use for bleaching unwanted hair. This is not hair on your head, but mustaches that have no place on a woman's face, and moles that miraculously sprout when they are not supposed to.
I went to CVS, marched straight past the hair dyes, and picked up a bottle of Jolen.
Back home, I made a paste of the bleach and powder, and carefully picked out strands of hair to bleach the roots. I covered my fingers in bleach and ran them up and down, attempting to clean up the blobs of bleach that kept dropping off. This, it turns out, wasn't done as successfully as I had thought. My blonde streaks are now a rather garish shade of orange, and there are leopard print patches of blonde dotted here and there.
It is, in short, disastrous. You would think I would have marched back to my regular colorist and begged him to fix it, but here's the rub: I am now too ashamed. Instead I have stocked up on temporary color mousse, and my orangey blonde streaks are now a fetching shade of chocolate. I have two more canisters of mousse to get through and hopefully, by the time it has run out, I will have got over my embarrassment enough to ring him up and make a sheepish confession.
Failing that, I could always take a stroll down Main Street and ask if anyone knows how to do hair color...
