Committing hairy-kiri

I'm a smart cookie, and I'll tell you why: I know that I'm dumb, and I institute countermeasures ahead of time to prevent total embarrassment.

So when I showed up at Mary's this morning wearing a bandanna, she had no reason to suspect that I had orange and pink streaks in the hair underneath. I started wearing bandannas over my hair in college, actually around the time I dyed my hair for the first time, as a freshman. Not coincidental, and it came in handy today.

Evidently five years is enough time to forget why it's a bad idea to dye your hair on your own. The last time I did it, it turned out this weird red color that doesn't occur in nature, but fortunately it washed out before my supply of bandannas ran out. This time, I knew I was bored with my hair, but I didn't want to repeat the Red Tragedy of '99. I decided "just to highlight it." That was my first mistake.

Highlights are significantly harder than all-over color, because you have to carefully control where the dye goes. This was made infinitely more difficult by the tool I was given to work with. It looked like a fork gone retarded,tines sticking out in every direction and a little bowl in the middle to hold the dye. I managed to get dye everywhere—on my shorts, on the sink, on the floor (and then on the soles of my feet as I walked on it), on my forehead and shoulders. Everywhere but my hair. The great thing about this dye was that somehow it was hot pink, despite the fact that we were going for kind of reddish-copper highlights. I was cheered, though, to see that the cat had some lovely copper streaks. I soldiered on.

Anyway, after an hour of pulling that crap through strands of my hair and then waiting for it to set, I washed the dye out and toweled off my hair. I waited for the steam to clear from the bathroom mirror only to see that my hair had been attacked by a kumquat with a grudge. The highlights were hot orange and had banded together to form a malicious, indistinct blob centered slightly to the left of my part. It appeared to be gearing up to attack my eyebrow. "Down through the widow's peak, boys! We'll go across the stray eyebrow hairs and get that eyebrow! And after that, the eyelashes!"

It was obvious I couldn't show my hair in public. So I decided to correct it. You can see that hair dye seeps into your brain pretty quickly and makes you dumb(er, if you're me). This morning, before my bandanna'd breakfast at Mary's, I swung by CVS (Motto: taking over the world one prescription at a time) and picked up a box of Revlon hair color, the kind that had both the dye and the highlights all in one package. I ate breakfast with Mary and went home to deal with the insurrection on my head.

The application of the all-over dye from Revlon went fine—it turned the orange to something close to the color I had originally hoped for. It was kind of a blood red, I guess, but I hadn't solved the clump problem. This is where dumb idea number three made its way out from under the masses of over-processed hair. "Well," it suggested, with barely repressed glee, "why don't you use the highlighting kit to see if you can break up the clomp with lighter color? It'll be a multi-colored effect. Very hip."

Fine. I put the highlights in, using the oversized mascara brush Revlon provided.
It was a somewhat better tool than the fork of doom, but it didn't do much better with getting the dye all the way down to the ends of my hair and thus preventing the dreaded clump. I finally gave up and worked it down the strand with my fingers. It was at this point that the phone rang. I picked it up, holding it as gingerly as I could, and brought it to my ear. It was my mother.

"What are you doing?"
"Um...nothing?" I lied. I like to preserve my parents' illusion that I'm not totally abusing their intelligence genes.
"Oh. Well, Touching the Void is on PBS tonight. And something with Jon Krakauer."
"Great. I'll check it out." My eye started to sting. I flipped a lock of wet hair out of it.
"Yeah, I knew you had read Krakauer's books, so I thought I'd let you know."
"Oh, thanks. I'll be sure to watch it."
"Big plans for today? Isn't Tex coming over?"

This went on for two minutes, and in the meantime, dye was running into my right ear and, I think, the second set of highlights was plotting with the first. When I rinsed the dye out fifteen minutes later, not only was the problem not alleviated, it was worse. I had somehow managed to add flamingo-pink highlights to the reddish areas that the all-over dye had quasi-corrected, plus the orange had staged a mysterious comeback over my right ear.

So, torn between a temper tantrum, tears, and uncontrollable laughter, I put the whole mess in a bun, put my bandanna back on, and headed out to Walgreen's, because I obviously couldn't go back to CVS. Time was of the essence—it was 1:30, and Tex was due sometime between 2 and 2:30 to fix my computer. I quickly grabbed a box of Garnier Nutrisse dye in the darkest brown I could find. No muss, no fuss, and it supposedly covered 100% of gray. I could only hope that the dye couldn't differentiate between orange and gray or pink and gray.

I mixed the powder and the developing conditioner, forgetting the "concentrated fruit oil" in my haste. Squeezing the bottle a little harder than strictly necessary, I began to apply the dye to my hair, praying all the while that my hair wouldn't just rebel all together and fall out, leaving me as sad as Charlie Brown's Christmas tree. I was hurrying so much that I didn't notice when a drop of dye splashed onto my nose, leaving a little brown spot that I still can't get out, hours later. Finally the dye bottle sputtered its last, and as I looked down to pitch it, I noticed the little packet of concentrated fruit oil. Swearing, I drizzled it over my hair like dressing over salad and, spinning my gooey locks into a loose bun, went to throw clothes into the closet and dishes in the dishwasher. As if Tex doesn't know what a horrible housekeeper I am already.

At 2:25, the door to my apartment burst open. "Uh...hang on," I said, and spent the next minute fumbling for a shirt I could ruin by pulling it over my dye-covered hair. I finally located a Rice freebie and shrugged into it, and then permitted Tex to enter. He manfully refrained from laughing when he saw me, acres of oddly colored and dripping hair on top of my head, wild look in my eyes. Or, knowing him, he didn't notice. Either way, I was grateful.

Eventually I got the last round of dye rinsed out, and blessed Garnier for living up to its promise. Even if it smells like a chemical factory, my hair now looks essentially as it did when I started, three dye jobs and many dollars ago. It's maybe a little darker, and there's a hint of a red sheen toward the back where the stragglers of the orange army wander aimlessly, looking for their slain kumquat leaders, but I'm not going to have to wear a bandanna to work tomorrow.

What have I learned? It's a damn good thing I'm applying to English graduate school and not to beauty school. And I'm going to Hobby Lobby tomorrow to get more bandannas.