In the Purple

I know I should accompany this with a photo… but I’m going to be a meanie and make this text only until I can figure out some way of taking a photo of the back of my head without growing another set of arms.

For my 40th birthday… I decided to be bold with my hair color… and get red highlights. My stylist over a Black Hearts Hair House… Kat… has suggested red highlights a couple of times… but I’ve always been a little iffy about the idea. I go through life with a perpetual flush anyway… I don’t need anything else to make me look red and blotchy. But I figured I was turning 40… and might as well do something I’ve never done before.

It was… well… interesting. Every time I looked into the mirror my reaction was rather like…”Whoa fuck… my hair is red!” My second reaction would usually be to play with it until the large highlighted chunks were hidden. After two weeks… I knew I was done with red… and then it started to fade out. Bad…from red… to orange… probably on its way towards looking like someone peed on my head.

So… seven weeks later and I was back in Kat’s chair. And she asked if I’d like to do something funky with vegetable dies rather than another hair-frying application of permanent highlights. (I usually go several haircuts between highlights.)
In a fit of whimsy… I decided on purple. Yeah… actual purple. No… I didn’t also have plans to pierce my lips and work in a record store. I had myself convinced that it wouldn’t be too bold and unusual… or couldn’t be more unusual than the mauve… or the really bright red… so I let her paint on the “Pimpin Purple” over my faded highlights and have at it.

I have to say… I like it quite a bit. It’s less shocking than the red…and the red I had was actually a “comes in nature” color of red. It’s less noticeable too.
Anyway… why is my haircolor blogworthy?

A long… long time ago I remember a Saturday Night Live skit with Eddie Murphy in it… where he got himself made up in “whiteface” to see what he was missing.

http://www.snotr.com/video/422/Eddie_Murphy_goes_undercover

And it’s a lot what having purple hair is like. Strangers smile at you. People come up to you and tell you how much they like your hair. Kids point at my head and scream… “Mommy! I wan’t purple hair!” When I say I had it done in a salon… pens and paper must be found so I can scribble down the phone number for people. It’s like I’ve gone from being a fat, middle-aged woman who isn’t pretty… but isn’t ugly… to some sort of daring hair vixen.

I’m not exaggerating… I’ve had no fewer than 20 compliments on my hair in less than a week.

When you’re not one of the “beautiful people” you don’t learn how to take compliments. I tend to “p’shaw” folks when they tell me I look nice. I also have a mirror… look at myself every day… and have never seen anything special. I don’t take my appearance that seriously… don’t wear make up… don’t primp that much… so when something as easy as changing my hair color makes me feel pretty…
It’s a good feeling.

But alas… purple hair is not very office friendly. I’ve had a few strange looks from management… and after this fades and grows out I think I’ll be back to plain old naturally occurring colors. Because being noticed by strangers is fine… being noticed by someone with the power to fire me because they don’t like my hair… not so fine. For the next few weeks… I will enjoy being pretty… vibrant… different… and then go back to the obscurity of highlighted brown.