Hair Club for Women and Rebellious Teens

It's been a lifelong desire to have unnatural hair colors, possibly because I grew up listening to No Doubt and also because I wasn't allowed to dye my hair as a teenager. I got to dye my hair a few times (always natural colors) before my mom panicked about the possibility of having a Satan-worshipping lesbian daughter and said I couldn't dye my hair anymore until I was eighteen and living elsewhere.

So I did what any fourteen year old would. I went to stay with my dad for two weeks and dyed my hair blue. And when it was time to go back home, I dyed my hair brown again.

And, well, my mom was a lot smarter then fourteen-year-old me gave her credit for. There was a lot of yelling and some hitting and some nasty phone calls to my dad involved. My dad told my mom the same thing I did: that I was fourteen and didn't have a job and if I wanted blue hair, why not? It's better to experiment with hair dye rather than with drugs. Telling me not to dye my hair was a stupid rule.

That was the end of my hair dyeing adventures until college, where I proceeded to experiment with red hair (bad idea), henna hair staining (a goopy and very smelly idea), and purple hair (which earned me a lot of strange looks from my sorority-girl classmates in the good ol' College of Education). I learned that I liked my natural hair color best, but that I envied people who could have blue or purple hair all the time.

Now that I'm an unemployed college graduate, I can!

I'll start by showing you a picture of my hair in its generally unmolested state as I prepared for my journey:

As you can see, it's a darkish brown. I enlisted my friend Tina to help me with the bleaching and dyeing process. I was to help her tint her hair with henna for the first time.

We were both in for nasty surprises. 

Dying your hair with henna is like joining a pyramid scheme. Once someone has duped you into joining, your only method for survival is to find victims of your own. If you've never dyed your hair with real henna, you should know that it's only for hardcore people who don't want to use real hair dye. It's also for people who either have no sense of smell or those who don't mind the smell of dog shit drying on their hair for three hours. 

I didn't document Tina's process, as I felt she'd suffered enough injustice through the ordeal. But if her husband ever makes good on his threat to upload a video of it to YouTube, I'll let you know.

My turn was next. After some debating, we chose to forego a bleaching kit in favor of a cheap box of blond hair dye. It would do the same job, but without doing as much damage to my hair (we hoped). Our plan worked, with some minor hiccups.

It's hard to tell from the photo, but my hair came out patchy and oddly colored. I'll call it Canary Auburn. Also, there were huge spots of still-brown hair. For the sake of our friendship, I'll say Tina missed these spots by accident. She wanted to fix them, but we didn't because that would involve (1) putting more bleach on my head and (2) digging through the trash to get the bleach.

And after hours of waiting, it was Purple Time!

As you can see, I chose to mix two Manic Panic dyes: Purple Haze and Ultra Violet. Here are the long-awaited results: 

This is what a Satan worshipper would look like, if I actually worshipped Satan.