Blondes like me

Have you ever had one of those moments where you realize your brain has played a trick on you? Over Thanksgiving I was around my sister in law (SIL for my BZ friends) and we were talking about hair color. My boys are relatively blonde. For many years of my adult life, I was relatively blonde, too. As you can see from my childhood pics in previous posts, I was relatively blonde as a child.

For whatever reason, the Gods of Hair Color have played a cruel trick on me and while I was blissfully highlighting 90% of my hair from the age of twenty to thirty, the underlying color was getting darker and darker and darker.

A few years ago I said "Hey, how cool would it be to go back to my natural color? Wouldn't that be cool?" Yes, well, I was shocked to find that my natural color is about sixteen shades darker than I imagined it was. Which means my roots were eighteen shades darker than I thought they were while they were growing out (because of a neat little trick of the eye where your roots look darker than they actually are next to the brightness of highlights). But I digress.

I stuck to my plan, and retained my natural color with a little chemical help here and there. Hey, highlights do more than lighten your hair, you know. They add texture and help it have a style, too. So I would highlight a little, and then have my Girl put a little gloss over that to make it Reddish. The whole process would take twenty nine hours over two days and I'd end up looking remarkably like I did when I came into the salon. And my wallet was $200 lighter.

Well, apparently my brain never got the message that my hair is now Dark. Because whenever I see women with blonde highlighted hair, I think "oh, she looks like me." And when I see brunettes, I think "oh, look, a brunette." So do you remember my SIL that I mentioned at the beginning of this long-winded story? Well, at Thanksgiving I believe she said something to the effect of "Austin's hair is so dark. It's almost as dark as Heather's!" I was so confused for a minute. Maybe there's another Heather in our family?

Ahh, gotta love families, right!? Nothing like your family to remind you that you're old, or fat, or dark-haired, or poor.