Years and years ago when all of this started and the hair salons first shut down, we (the women) all started Googling how to dye our hair at home since we have all opted into a shared secrecy agreement to never let on that we all start going grey at around 25. We’ve kept the secret this long. We’re not going to let something like a global pandemic blow all of our covers.
The most common advice then, back when we were young and hopeful, was to please just wait. Please don’t mess with your hair. Hair color seems so easy. You just sit in the chair and the stylist paints on the color and you wait under the cozy warm dryer and then everything is beautiful! But the hair stylists of the world knew better and imagined the tears and the drama and the panic attacks and all that extra work once the salons opened again.
And I thought, well sure. But I’m not going to wait two years to go back to pretending my natural hair color isn’t mostly grey with a few dark blonde highlights.
I started panic buying hair color kits with no research and no idea what I was doing. Sure that if I waited even a moment longer, it would all be gone to wherever the toilet paper had disappeared to.
But once I turned my hair orange, and then green (I was not going for orange or green), I figured I should watch some YouTube videos.
What I’ve learned is that hair stylists are chemists or physicists or maybe magicians and they have to know about molecules and how particles interact and even the color of your veins make a difference.
I’m now at the stage of quarantine where I ponder pouring an entire bottle of ketchup on my head. I’ve seen this technique recommended in several YouTube videos now and am beginning to understand how one becomes a flat earther because once you see enough confident faces autoplay, you can be convinced of just about anything.
The ketchup is red and thus presumably cancels out the green undertone that can arise from an ashy brown color you attempt to put in your blonde hair. Which is confusing to me since I went with the ashy brown to counteract (and cover up) the unexpected orange in the blonde I tried first. I first tried a blue shampoo for the orange (I am also learning about color wheels) and it turned my hair a startling blue.
I’ve determined that my skin has cool tones and thus needs a cool color (like the ashy brown) or my skin has warm tones and thus needs a warm color (like… the ketchup…?) and that my hair is warm and therefore has a tendency to turn orange or is cool and has a tendency to turn green. Also it’s possible the blonde I chose just had a little red in it since I was blonde to start with (from when I was born).
In any case, I have brown hair now. Many people have commented on it in Zoom calls. But not like “oh, your hair looks great!” More like, “oh, you changed your hair”, followed by several seconds of awkward silence.
I can’t say that this experience has taught me to appreciate my hair stylist because I always appreciated my hair stylist and I never wondered what it might be like to attempt color at home. So I guess this experience has taught me to trust my instincts.
And like it or not, apparently I also need to learn how to color my hair with ketchup.