Change is Hard

Change is hard, and it is time-consuming. But sometimes it's necessary. My most recent round of personal change has involved two full afternoons sitting in a salon chair, undergoing a stylist's absolutely heroic efforts to remove the blue and green from my hair.

It was funny, in an "not very ha-ha" sort of way – how I'd spent so much time and effort trying to preserve the color … and when it came time to be rid of it, we could't get the damn stuff out to save our lives. In the end, it took three full rounds of color lifting and bleaching plus fillers and dyes to be (mostly) rid it.

And I say (mostly) because underneath, if you shine a bright light on it, you can still see bits and pieces of the aqua hue shimmering through. But just barely, and I'm prepared to ignore it. I'm not undergoing another eleven hours of level-grinding just to fine-tune it – and if I don't point it out, no one will ever notice it.

Right about now, you may be wondering – WHY??? And that's a fair thing to wonder, because it was fabulous and I loved it. The answer is simple: I didn't want to, but I needed to – because the fabulous peacock hair was simply too expensive to maintain. It literally cost me more than my student loan payments. (Yes, literally. I know what that word means, and I am deploying it appropriately here.)

Remember the New Year's resolutions? Chief among them was money-saving, as the hubs and I are preparing to buy a house sometime in the next year or so. With this in mind, I simply could not justify the cost any longer.

Really, if it hadn't been such a damn chore to remove the stuff, I'd probably miss it more. It's hard to feel too nostalgic about something that cost you several hundred dollars and two full afternoons of outrageous effort to be rid of.*

And now … well. Now I feel like I'm all incognito or something. It's an odd feeling, but kind of cool. Lancer Forney at Emerson Salon (on Cap Hill, Seattle) did a great job of (a). not frying my hair, which is astounding given how long it had lifters/fillers/ bleaches/dyes on it, (b). talking me out of doing drastic things as my patience went off a freaking cliff somewhere around day two, hour eight, and (c). leaving me with a great end result that is actually soft and shiny. ALL HAIL.

Anyway, I guess you're wondering what it looks like now.

Okay. Let me show you.

(Either click the jump, or keep on scrolling.)

Click here to get a gander at the results »

[Crossposted from my website. If you'd like to comment, you can do so either here or there.]