What A Woman Will Do...

... to look pretty. For the last few years, I've had my hair professionally colored and highlighted. Now that I'm unemployed, I decided to cut that expense by doing it myself. And, I must say, I did a pretty good job.

I didn't always.

The summer after my eighteenth birthday, I wanted to have lighter hair. (I'm a brunette.) So I used a product called Sun-In.

First thing you need to understand is... Sun-In is supposed to be used by people with blonde hair. Not brunettes. So by the end of summer I had lighter hair that was not quite strawberry blonde. It was more orange than that. But not orange-orange, so I didn't look like a freak.

But I couldn't stop there. Of course not. At the time, I worked for a large distributor of beauty and barber supplies. One of my co-workers was a former beautician. When I decided that I needed a perm, she felt my hair and looked at it and said that it seemed fine. I should be able to get a perm with no problem. So I did. And ended up with what felt like curly straw for hair.

It looked okay. Just very dry. Dry as in it felt like it would break-off-when-you-touched-it dry.

But wait. There's more. Two days before I'm getting ready to leave for college, one day before my best friend's wedding, I decided that my hair needed to be just a little darker. Not as orange looking. So, back to my beautician co-worker. Use a henna rinse, she said. It'll darken your hair a little but you'll still have nice highlights.

Did you know that there are blue-based hennas and green-based hennas? The reason I ask is, I didn't know that. And apparently I picked up a green-based henna. Because when I washed my hair after using it, it was darker, for sure.

It was a beautiful forest green. I kid you not. I had gone from a strawberry-blonde-orange look to forest green. My hair was so porous (read "damaged") that it just sucked up all the base color. So now instead of light curly straw, I had dark green curly straw.

Oy. So I'm all in a panic, calling my hair salon, begging them to get me in. I can't go to my friend's wedding with green curly straw for hair. The only solution: chop it all off. And for the next three or four months, every morning after I washed my hair, I put one of those temporary rinses in to cover the green. As soon as my hair was long enough to cut again (it was only about an inch and a half long at this point), I got it trimmed and had all the green gone.

The moral to this story: if you've done anything to your hair, stay away from henna. Just. Back. Away. Also, if someone you know is a beautician but isn't working as one... there's probably a good reason.