I’m going to dye.
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My Hair


While I was standing in the flu shot line and listening to the spoiled workers in front of me bitch about their ergonomic chairs, I noticed that one of them needed to color her hair. I mean really needed to color her hair. She looked all right but her hair was a lot older then she was. Her hair was not working for her, it was working against her and she needed to seriously meet it half way - at her colorists.

The lady might have been a big Bonnie Raitt fan, but we are not all Bonnie Raitt. The rest of us don’t go into that white night that bravely, especially those of us who are not graced with so much talent that even our hair follicles are artistic. Most of us do not look good with streaky white hair. I knew looking at that other woman, I was looking at a mirror.

It’s not like I can ignore the white hair. I have mirrors and a newish prescription, denile is not turning my white hair brown. The white hair and it is white not gray, thank you very much, the white hair stands out. When I first started to see these intruders, way, way back in college, they were kind of cute. One at a time. Tweezers could keep on top of them. Those were the forward scouts. The white hair armies have arrived.

I am not ready to wave a white flag. I'm too young to look this old.

This will not be the first time I dyed "colored" my hair. In the past I’ve done it out of youthful spontaneity: "Wouldn't it be fun to be blonde!!, Hey! Look at her! I could be a red head!" My senior year of High School I Sun In’ed my self into orange hair. That was enough of a deterrent to hair coloring that I didn’t go near chemical enhancements for years. Oh, my friends did, dark purple, various shades of bottle blond, red - but I stayed true. I wasn’t going down that road again because once you and your hair take that off ramp into chemical slavery, you're finished.

But.

Time passed.I found more white hair. Cheap hair color was used. I found a reasonably good colorist and I was winning battles with the armies and I paid the price for it too, until I realized that I wasn’t get paid enough to fight the war. I surrendered. I kept the stray white hair issue in check for a good long time but the armies of whiteness have been starting to make real in roads and they are getting harder and harder manually keep under control. It is time for chemical weapons. It has become more then one girl and a pair of tweezers can keep up with: My friend Andi McDowell has been telling me for years that she can rescue me from the advancing hordes. Andi McDowell wouldn’t lie to me would she?

I think the last time I used color out of a box ( pre-colorist) it was a drippy, messy nasty affair. Andi McDowell has promised me a non - drippy, non - messy, non -nasty experience this time and I want to believe her. I worry though. The last time was so messy and nasty and drippy and so not what whomever was doing the commercials back then indicated it would be, that the next time I got a yen for change I ended up paying someone else five or six or seven boxes of OTC hair dye to do it for me.

I’m not even sure why I did it, if it was as long ago as I think it was. I certainly didn’t have a need then way back in the mists of time - except it may have been in response to what a TV character did with her hair - but I try not to be that pathetic, so I must have had a coupon too and now I have actual gray to cover and no coupon. Andi McDowell better be all about chapter and verse on the truth in advertising laws because I can’t afford to pay someone else even three or four boxes of OTC hair dye every month to keep back the hordes.