Dye another day

I used to dye my hair a lot, but not to obscure the creeping onset of white plumage. I experimented with all sorts of colors, even trying for white one time (trying for a specific look for a play I was in). The unsuccessful attempt at white hair (it ended up sort of butter-colored) was the only time I ever had my hair dyed by a professional. All the other times, I did it myself.

I liked the whole process: the smell of the bleach, the two hours of hopping in and out of the shower, choosing the colors (I liked to mix them together), figuring out ways to avoid having all of my skin change hue for three days.

Before too long, however, I would have to shave it all off to start again. The bleach and the cumulative damage just took too much of a toll, and I had to hit the reset button on my head. This cycle continued for about a decade. Occasionally, I would try a more natural brown out for a while, but the call was too strong. I was partial to blues, if you must know.

I had a favored brand of bleach, and always kept a kit of it handy should the mood strike. I had a preferred brand of dye for the more unusual colors: discovered at a tattoo parlor in Golden, CO in the days when I was working as an accountant for a major fast-food chain. It took me a long time to find it here in Chicago, at a little store which otherwise only sold clothing I would never wear in a million years: lots of shiny pleather and metal, spiky things.

In the event that I needed it, I also kept a kit of brown dye on hand. It was darker than my natural color, and I could cover all traces of my deviance in about an hour and a half, if I needed to (I used to freelance through an agency, and they used to call to tell me if I needed to have brown hair when I showed up somewhere the following morning).

I used to make a point of going out on job interviews with my hair colored, so there would be no confusion later on as to who it was they were hiring. I suppose it's lucky that I work in a creative field. For ten years, it was almost never a problem with an employer.

I had a lot of trouble convincing people that my band did not play punk music. People see something and they expect something. When I worked at an ad agency in a touristy neighborhood, I would be stopped on the street by people, usually Asian, who would insist on having their pictures taken with me.

I liked having dyed hair. I didn't do it to be rebellious, or to display anger at something or another. It was just something I did, and it felt right somehow to me that I did it, that I looked like that.

For some reason, I stopped dyeing my hair a bit over a year ago. I think I was mostly tired of having to shave it. I don't want a shaved head again. But lately, I have been thinking how nice it would be to go back to blue.

I miss blue.