Background Information: I was dating a guy. He mentioned once that blonde highlights might look cool in my hair. I got blonde highlights. I broke up with this guy. I didn't want blonde highlights anymore.
So, here we are. It was the fall of 2003 (my senior year) on a school night. Sara, Katie, and I were at Katie's house and we had just bought some box hair color at Walmart. I'm not sure if Katie ended up doing anything to her hair or if she was just offering moral support (which, you'll find out later, I really needed). Sara chose caramel highlights. I chose a dark brown color with an auburn tint. (Those of you that do hair or are just smart when it comes to hair color already know how this ends ... but just hold on.)
Peggy, Katie's mom and someone who was very experienced with box color, did the color on our hair. Sara's result was great. It looked natural and lovely. I was next.
This is where I have a hard time. I'm not quite sure how to describe the color that had taken over my thick head of hair. It was something like this ...
plus this ....
plus this ...
If you think those hair colors are even remotely cute, that's fine. I'll agree ... they actually look pretty decent on the girls' faces. But, people, it's me. I'm not an edgy-rocker-punk kind of person and certainly wouldn't have been able to pull this look off in high school.
I was completely and utterly convinced that my life was over. So were Katie and Sara. However, they didn't let on to this at the time. They kept smiling and saying, "We can fix it, we can fix it!" I found out later that while Peggy was fixing my hair with box after box of hair color, they were in the other room admitting that they had no idea how this was going to turn out.
Do I have a picture? Of course not. This coloring experience was a pretty big regret. But an even bigger regret is that I have no photo to show for it.
All I can say is thank goodness for Peggy and the 3 boxes of dark brown that saved my life. Because of those boxes, I ended up with dark brownish, blackish, purpleish hair. Trust me, it was a huge step up from carrot top red-orange. My parents were a bit frustrated that I got home at 3am on a school night but I guarantee you if they would've seen the first color, they would've sent me right back. It's not a great picture, but here's what I looked like pretty soon after my hair dying trauma. In fact, I think it might've been the next day.
The process of getting back to my natural hair color was quite the journey. I kept my hair short so that I could keep chopping off the red that continued to creep back into my hair. I'm not sure how many times I put more brown in it, but it was a lot. Here I am at my high school graduation ... one step closer to my original color.
My hair was officially back to normal once I started my freshman year of college. So ... it was a full year of janky hair.
Lessons learned: 1. Don't put anything red or tinted red on anything blonde. 2. Take pictures of really ridiculous things so you can laugh later.
I had almost the same experience in high school! I decided to use a box color without looking at the color chart. My hair was bright orange and my mom had to take me to walmart crying with a bandanna over the mess. We purchased the darkest brown we could find and I wound up with brown, red, and purple hair! This post made me smile!
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