Hairy Situations

This story should have come out when it happened, in October near Halloween, as it was an on-going nightmare and ended with me holding a razor menacingly to my hair. My vanity prevented me from divulging the secret then, but today's overcast gloom lends itself to the telling of such misery and woe. Actually, I did tell a handful of people what happened and they all laughed, for days.

For most my life I've been minimally concerned about my hair. It's a little too fine and slick for funky hair styles (which I've tried and have awful family photos to remind myself that a pixie cut doesn't suit me), so I usually let it grow out and pull it into a twisted knot throughout the day. Simple. And then the terrible awful thing happened.

As a child my white-blonde sisters convinced me I'd been adopted. How else could anyone explain my brown hair. While this accusation brought tears to my eyes I reminded myself that both my parents had darker hair at the time. By age 7 my hair had gone from brown to raven and I hypothesized that my hair was experiencing a rapid aging process. It seemed everyone in my family (parents included) had white-blonde hair that gradually darkened. Now They all have some variation of sun-streaked brown. My hair? It continued it's rapid aging and at the all-too-young age of 21 I began to notice strands of white.

I pulled them out, cried to my roommate Tracie that life was over and she should push me off a bridge and put a hold on that year's birthday celebrations. Then something miraculous happened. I found a strand that had gone from black to white to black. A fluke! I wasn't aging horribly fast and life continued.

Three years later driving home from St. George with my cousins, Laney commented on the crown of white I had poking through my part. I immediately burst into tears. After many attempts to console me Kellie and Laney offered to help me dye my hair. And so began the lengthy search for the perfect hairdresser.

Sidenote: Every so often my spontaneous side catches the better of me and I allow friends to chop inches off my hair. Usually this ends badly. I never kept a hairdresser for this reason. Also, I was too cheap to pay someone good.

My cousins gave me a referral to the most beloved hairdresser. Kristi tamed my wild inclinations and tastefully added fun colors and an anime hair cut. I loved it so much that for the first time in my life I went back, and back, and back. It was love. And then I moved. To the Midwest. Where hairstyles scare me.

I refused to have anyone touch my hair for a little too long. The first girl I went to did fine. Just a little blunt cut trim, lacking imagination, style and grace. I longed for Kristi and her magic scissors. Nearly a year later, my mom and sisters commented that my ends looked a little dry and perhaps my personal appearance could use a boost. The truth stung. I asked around for some recommendations (which I had done the first time) and was given the name of a trendy salon in cute Peoria Heights.

The deliberation process took a couple weeks and then I recklessly agreed to an appointment with the first stylist available.  It felt good to know that someone else would dye my hair, trim off the straw ends and recreate my image. A fair trade for the protruding belly I had since acquired.

The lady seemed nice enough until she attacked my head with a paintbrush. I'd only asked for a touch up and that somehow translated to "stab my head with a poky brush and stinging dye". Noted. What I failed to note was the increasingly larger perimeter she maintained on my hairline. Maybe no one told her that to dye eyebrows you don't have to dye the forehead. Oh, and I wasn't getting my brows done...

I kept telling myself that she would use the magic wipe cloth and fix me up. And she did. But it didn't fix anything. I had a dark black line the width of a pudgy forefinger around my hairline. ON MY FOREHEAD.

At home I furiously scrubbed at the dye with soap, nail polish remover, anything I could find. It worked a little and soon I was left with a faint brownish stain, you know like dried blood on your favorite white shirt. Fine, really.

I figured everything would be back to normal after I took a shower in the morning. The dye did fade more after my shower and I wasn't so freakish looking. Two days later I realized that I was no longer looking at dye on my skin. No, she had managed to dye any facial fuzz I had giving me sideburns. Skip was jealous. Or would have been had he been home when I made the discovery. He was not and I courageously took a razor to the sideburns.

This foolish act created a clean-shaven effect right up to the point where I'd neatly chopped off my wispy locks by my hairline. Legitimate 12-year-old boy sideburns.

I am no longer allowed to touch my hair without husband supervision.