Home hair coloring – the “Before” blog post (“After” to follow)

So eight weeks removed from my last hair color and I am acutely aware of how old my hair follicles are.  If I ever had thoughts of becoming a “silver fox”….now is the time.  However, I’m not yet ready to emerge from this quarantine as an older, fatter version of McC and so I will at least make a try at maintaining some sort of hair style while also trying to break up with the chocolate bowl.   

We have an acquaintance who is a hair stylist and has apparently established a black market of DIY hair coloring kits.  He told us to “send me a picture and I’ll match the color”.  Which got me thinking: 

• How good IS the photo quality on my phone?  (I’m getting ready to find out.)
• If anyone asks, that is why I have an otherwise inexplicable picture on my phone of nothing but my grey roots
  
• Did he get like 40 different root shots from various customers?? And how exactly does he match each picture with its delivery address so I don't end up with the “Ruby Fusion” delivery?

Although I have to confess, I will not…as long as I live…ever forget the cautionary tale from my older sister when she colored her own hair back in college.  She said she was going for something less “mousy” and more “black sheen”.  Less bare and more Cher.  Except she either bought the wrong color or left it on waaaaay too long.  While all pictures have subsequently been destroyed, rumor has it she was left with hair that was the color and density of black felt - like someone had cut a swath of craft fabric and pasted it to her head.   She spent the better part of the weekend looking like Wednesday Addams before she ultimately found someone to bleach all of her hair and then recolor back to her a natural color.

It is with that cautionary tale in mind that I begin my own DIY home color.  I figure if I color it early enough in Covid, that my hair will have time to grow out before I have to get the obligatory repair job.  Like worse case, I will spend the rest of quarantine in a ballcap – but I’m living that life right now already.  I’m just praying I don’t do so much damage that I have to spend the rest of my life in a ballcap.  

It is hard to get any volunteers to apply hair coloring.  Apparently, my promises of hair-dresser-amnesty are not being believed.  I initially asked Rita and she was like – umm…get six feet back from me.  Then I asked my sister (the other sister and not the one of the black felt hair whose help I didn’t request) and she said “Nopedy, Nope, Nope.  Remember when we were kids and you told on me to mom & dad for cutting your ponytail while you were napping? Well…I’m not touching your hair again.”  It looks like Nic has been playing the long game on paybacks.  I had just broken the news to my 82-year-old mother that she was going to have to learn a new skill when Rita came around.  She apparently decided she had a vested interest in the outcome since she’s the one who will be looking at me. So we will both wear masks and gloves and she will stretch out her arms as much as possible and plan for the toxic chemicals to kill any hidden Covid germs.  

And unfortunately, there ain’t no open salon out there to do rescue stylin’ right now.  So I could be Wednesday Addams for the duration.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to spend this pandemic in goth.  

More to follow….