Going Blue

I went into a building that wasn’t my house yesterday. A grocery store. For the first time since starting quarantine on March 8th I went to a grocery store by myself. It was frightening. It also wasn’t my former place of employment. I am not ready for that. (Yes, I was fired. I had to be to collect unemployment. Fear of COVID is not a valid reason to be out for more than 2 weeks in NY. My former employer generously gave all of us COVID absentees much longer but the end is the same. No work, no job. I don’t blame them at all.)

Why go to a store anyhow? Because it’s Mick’s birthday soon and I needed ingredients for his gift. A gift my son thinks is dorky as hell, btw. Not sure why, nor do I care. Being dorky and odd and exasperating is what I am supposed to be – it’s in the Mom handbook. Page 107, I believe.

We have enough stuff. Too much stuff. So my husband and I exchange other things as gifts. Experiences. Meals out. Occasionally little luxuries which are technically ‘stuff’ but are enjoyed in the using. (My guy keeps me in pricey moisturizers and lovely dark chocolates.) Since concert tickets, museum trips, and restaurants are out thanks to the quarantine I am making all kinds of yummy goodies as Mick’s birthday gift this year. Bacon jam. Balsamic-glazed cippolini. Marinated mushrooms. And dill pickles. Two kinds – garlic and spicy. Everything except the glazed onions take at least a week’s lead time, hence the trip to the scary, scary grocery store. (He does all the shopping now and I could hardly ask Mick to buy the ingredients for his own birthday gift, durr.)

As a total newbie in this strange new world of masks and traffic patterns I assumed people were cutting me startled looks because I was accidentally violating some new unwritten rules of pandemic grocery shopping. Perhaps. But mostly I think it was this:

My hair matches my dress and I never even thought about it until I was home again.

Yes, probably the only truly happy thing about being fired is being able to wear my hair any damn color I please again. Honestly I am still iffy about this shade of blue. But I’ve done just about every shade of pink and purple already going all the way back to 1982 and my lavender tufty. Blue is fun. I’m using Overtone. Aside from smelling like a buffalo’s armpit the product worked as advertised. Nice. The color doesn’t bleed unless my hair is wet. My pillowcase isn’t blue, but the towel I use exclusively on my noggin is. I’ve washed my hair once since I applied the Overtone and as expected the blue faded a little but was by no means ‘wash and gone’.

Please be aware of a few things: At least 30% of my hair was stripped almost white already. I deliberately chose an Overtone shade made for brown hair so I knew going in the bleached hair would grab pigment like crazy, as would the scant (dammit!) grey hairs. I was curious if I’d see any blue on the brown part and sadly the answer is No. If you’re looking for color and don’t want to pre-bleach your hair I would suggest a ‘party’ product such as spray-on colors or hair chalk. You get a blast of color with zero commitment.

I know some of you are considering anime hair colors. Good for you! However……bold hair requires a bold public persona. If you are uncomfortable with people looking at you, if you fret about being mocked and/or judged, if you are self-conscious to the point where you mentally gnaw at things afterward and never get to sleep until 3:00 am, um,

DO NOT COLOR YOUR HAIR SOMETHING ‘UNNATURAL’.

That, my darlings, is a recipe for disaster and neurosis.

I’m plenty neurotic, but being stared at and whispered about isn’t a biggie for me. See above about being honestly oblivious to the hair/dress thing. Obliviousness is woven into my DNA and it’s saved me a lot of grief. Truly the last time I can remember being out of my element and feeling like a doughy nothing was a friend’s bachelorette outing in NYC. I was delighted to lay a big old squeezy hug on my friend and was so pleased to be included in her plans! But talk about being an oddball! Every single thing about me was off and somehow wrong. To be thrown into a group of astonishingly accomplished women who were at least a decade younger and had been friends since college I felt like an elderly hippopotamus who’d wandered into a combined Mensa/Nobel prize committee meeting during the Olympics. World-class athletes! Doctoral candidates! Multi-lingual, published, traveled women who’d been going and doing all while I’d been here in my dumb pokey town dealing with a kid who bit, shit, spit, and drove me to tears at least twice a day. Accomplished? I was lucky if I’d showered and had a cuppa before being summoned to deal with that day’s Wolf mess. I had nothing on my CV and spent several weeks after the party shivering with self-disgust and weeping from humiliation and embarrassment. (NOT my friend’s doing AT ALL. I bring it up only so y’all understand that I get feeling awkward and am warning you to be prepared spiritually if you’re going to go public wearing cartoon hair.)

Okay, you’re girded up. Your life status allows you to color your hair something from the Rainbow Brite collection.

Unless your hair is already blonde, white, or grey you will need to do some prep work. The more natural pigment you can remove from your coif the brighter and more lasting the new color will be. This means bleach. Scary, smelly, stings like a motherfucker bleach. My pigment is concrete and has made seasoned hair dressers blanch. The shit won’t budge so I use the hair stripping version of a nuke – 40% peroxide, left on for a nutty amount of time, aided by applying heat. Twice. Don’t do this! You WILL be bald. I literally have over 50 years experience in nuking my hair and have fried it many times. Like ‘break off at the scalp’ fried. So go easy. Start with 20% peroxide. You can always wait a while between bleachings and try again. Remember to condition!

Now you’ve lightened your hair several shades and damaged the cuticle enough so your strands are open and porous. You’re ready for some brilliant color!

Almost.

Most semi-permanent or permanent color kits fail to make this next step important enough – you MUST put a barrier along your hairline and on your ears! Vaseline. Rub a thin layer along the skin at the edge of your hairline. All the way around. Then do the same for your ears, especially the tops. This is the most common mistake of home colorists. Their hair looks good but their ears are dyed and they have streaks running down their necks and foreheads.

Wear gloves!

Both with the bleaching and the coloring your hands will bear the brunt if you don’t wear gloves.

“LA, you’re scaring me!”

Good. I mean to. Not because there’s anything truly dangerous about dyeing your hair a wonderful shade of apricot or kelly green, but because lack of preparation and understanding leads to disastrous results and much unhappiness. I love cartoon hair colors and it irks me to see them done badly.

Like new cars a bold color job starts to lose value the second the deal’s done. Before coloring you should think whether you can handle new growth, your mop fading into odd shades, nosy questions from strangers, and 2:00 am trips to the can where you flip on the light, catch yourself in the mirror and go, “Holy Mother of God my hair is turquoise! With grey roots! GAH!”

If you can handle all that…YAY! You’re ready.

Have fun. Send me a pic.

 

Much love, ~LA