Originally posted 03.02.2004
I grew up in a Midwestern town populated mostly by people of Scandinavian descent. Blond was the rule, from dishwater to platinum, and my dark tresses were just another source of discomfort to me when I looked in the mirror—a pale, freckled, short brunette in a jungle of bronzed, blond Amazons. I tried, at first, to accept and embrace this difference, to love my brown hair. I did my best to advocate for brunettes everywhere, a cheerleader for Jacqueline Smith, scornful of Farrah. But in my heart of hearts, I coveted Jean Harlowe’s halo.
Despite the scorn of my mother, a darker brunette than I, who considered blond boring and limited and whose brave refusal to cover up the salt in her pepper won her admiring praise from women who considered it a mark of courage to let nature take its course, I did everything I could do in a small bathroom to bring out the light in my hair. Light that I knew was in there, like a thin person trapped in a fat body, like a small-scale trans-gender personality, I felt I was only working to release the true me, the color underneath.
The attempted transformation started innocently, idealistically, with lemon juice and sunshine. Which didn’t work. Sun-In and sunshine, however, did. Brilliantly. Thus encouraged, still unwilling to go full blond, which would truly have been cheating, I turned to peroxide and developer, applied in streaks. The effect, despite the lack of skill that often results in shocking brassiness for 15-year-olds who dye by their own hand, was so credible that years later, when I gave up the cosmetic fib and let my hair grow in au natural, my father, a golden blond who had somehow convinced himself that I’d come by my honey tresses honestly, by gamboling about under summer skies and letting God’s own sun uncover the gold in my hair, considered the natural brown with a frown of disapproval. “Why did you dye your beautiful blond hair brown? It was so pretty.” To this day, he still blushes and begs my pardon for having blanked out on the true color of his firstborn’s hair for the first 15 years of her life. Of course, it didn’t stop there….
