Sunday, March 18, 2007
Does this wig make me look smarter?
Right now I am trying to figure out what I will be doing at my next hair appointment because it is a time for a change. Since my favorite hairdresser of the last several years is moving out of state in May, it has to be a big one. I figured there is no better way than to try it on for size, so I pulled out a couple of wigs in the styles I am considering and played around a bit.
Most of my life I was a blonde. When I was young it was a super light blonde bleached by the sun. After we moved to Alaska, and we had less time in the sun, it started to get a little darker. By the time I was around 11 I started dying my hair because my color was such a non-color. I was told the color I had was in the blonde family. My hairdresser called it ash. My honest hairdresser called it mousy. He said we either needed to throw some highlights in it to make it brighter or just go for something rich in the red or the chocolate family.
I got highlights and saw how different it made me look and feel. It just made everything seem cleaner and brighter, so I kept going lighter and lighter until it was really blonde again.
As it got lighter, I noticed something else changed. People started using new words to describe me that I had never heard before. I heard Bubbly, Gregarious, Flirty, Flighty, and Air headed. (There were more than that, but I am sure you get the idea.)
I was finding that I was actually getting quite the reputation for being a “dumb blonde”. For the most part, I’ve never really cared much for what people think about me, so it didn’t bother me until I started to realize that the people I wanted to take me seriously were among those not taking me seriously.
At that point I was getting very involved in political clubs at school. I was going to marches and rallies, and really working hard to change the world. I hung out in art/coffee houses with people who shared my interests and people who would, in many ways, become my mentors. I was more interested in books and music than in boys. I was doing a lot of writing and joining and winning essay contests. But I noticed that, for me, it always seemed twice as hard to break through.
On more than one occasion, after I got a new friend to a place where they were comfortable enough to be candid with me, they would eventually say something along the lines of, “You are not anything like I thought you were when I first met you. At first I thought you were kind of bubbly and maybe even a little dingy, but you aren’t like that at all.”
I decided it was time for the anti-makeover if I ever wanted to be taken seriously.
So what did I do? I cut all of my hair off and dyed it black.
Then the strangest thing happened. I no longer heard words like Bubbly, and flirty, instead I started hearing words like; Dark, serious, brooding, and Goth!
All because of a pair of orange handled kitchen scissors and a $7.99 box of drug store hair dye!
Since then I’ve been changing my hair color every couple of years whenever the mood strikes my fancy. It’s been pretty much any color you could imagine and then some. I've rather enjoyed the new "personas" that come with each change.
Here are a couple more shots from my wigging out session just for fun. (They were all taken the same night, just changed the outfits and the wig.):
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4 comments:
I think you look much nicer (and sexier) with dark hair
I vote for blond! but the dark hair looks great too....
Holy shit - you look great! Don't get me wrong - you looked great before but you've obviously lost a little weight. Congrats.
And I vote for the dark hair...
Thanks. I find it interesting that the boys have been voting for the dark hair and the girls have been voting for the light hair. Hmmm...
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