I didn’t realize how tightly my platinum-blonde hair was wound into my sense of identity until, suddenly, I couldn’t be a blonde anymore.
Up until a few months ago, I had been some iteration of blonde my entire life. As my naturally blonde hair darkened (around high school), I started putting more and more effort into gaming the system and making it lighter. I was fighting nature, vacillating between phases of highlights and bleach and tones, and honestly, I’m still surprised to this day that I was left with any hair on my head. (Ahem, bleach really does a number on your strands and your scalp.)
Alas, after years of good behavior and somehow maintaining long, thick, practically damage-free hair despite my lightening habit, my luck ran out and my hair finally threw in the towel. It was like suddenly, my head threw one huge tantrum to make up for the years of abuse I had put it through. I’d break out into full-body hives the second the bleach would touch my scalp at the salon, and while I scraped through for about a year with lots (and lots) of Benadryl pre-appointment, it was a Band-Aid solution. Sure, it kept the burning outbreak of hives at bay but not the actual damage my hair and scalp were enduring. As my wonderful colorist, Cassondra Kaeding, explained to me, there’s almost always an expiration date for bleaching. It had been a nice run, but it was now time for it to end. Except, I wasn’t ready.
I couldn’t imagine a world where I would feel anywhere like myself and not be blonde. I think I also had a weird subconscious fixation that maybe my bright-blonde hair—usually the first thing I was ever complimented on—was the single thing that made me attractive or desirable. (Problematic, I know, but as someone who has a history of body dysmorphia, not all too surprising.) As backward as it may sound, I felt like my blonde hair was my superpower. Ask any human, and they probably have some singular trait—be it physical or personality-wise—that they feel equally dependent on.
We experimented with darker shades of blonde, but for some reason, that was almost harder on me than if I had done a 360 and dyed my hair an entirely different color. If I couldn’t be bright platinum blonde, then I didn’t want to be blonde at all. And if I was going to try something new, I wanted it to be entirely unexpected.
