Blonde and Back Again: A Blogger's Tale

There comes a time in every bloggers life when it comes to his or hers self imposed ‘blog deadline’ and they hit ‘the wall’. The wall being that mystical force that makes your entire body reject the idea of writing a blog post.

Today I have hit that wall.

It comes from a result of having 4 hours of sleep, my period (yes, I’m sharing that with you, get over it), and the task of packing my shit up for the T in the Park festival looming over me – no I haven’t done it yet, get off my back already! It also stems from a week that has been so ripe with blog post material that my brain has simply collapsed under the weight of it all. It’s not a writer’s block but a writer’s avalanche.

First there’s the festival thing, which I’m pretty sure has some blog potential, even now in its pre-festival stage. All over the blog world there’s people taking pictures of their pre-planned festival outfits. Their festival make-up ideas. Their festival hair ideas – shit like that.

But unless you want to see a picture of my wellington boots, I don’t think my festival preparation is really blog worthy.

Then of course there’s been my exam results.  But unless you want to see pictures of a full bottle of vodka become an empty bottle – and my tear stained keyboard, I don’t think you’ll be interested.

Plus I don’t fancy being sued for slander by my university, by calling the person who marked my exam something offensive – like ‘YOU’RE A MASSIVE WANKER’ or ‘GO CRAWL BACK INTO YOUR MOTHER’S CUNT YOU TWAT!’

So that leaves only one topic left, my hair. I like this topic a lot better than the others because it allows me to indulge in the age old blog tradition of replacing words with pictures. Why make witty commentary when I can show you, step by step, through the powers of instagram, how I went blonde and shit myself, before quickly forking out £75 to go back to the original colour.

So enjoy!

First was stripping my hair. This was a lot less fun than the term 'stripping' initially  promised. The basic premise is that I sit with some smelly lotion on my head for an hour, while wrapped in cling film. In many way, this could be a scene from a very PG rated bondage film. 

Also, you should brace yourself for a couple more awkward faces from me. I find that if I distort my face enough, it tricks you into thinking I'm photogenic - though probably not.

Here's my hair after the stripping - my hair is naked, it's hair pornography. Stop looking you pervert. 

What's with the bush baby sized eyes? If any of you have sat with bleach on your hair, you'll know that the experience and be somewhat... uncomfortable. Sadly, this is the part of the story where things start to go a bit wrong. Wrong  in the sense the people doing my hair underestimated how much bleach was needed, so instead of all of my hair being bleach white, about 3/4 of the job was done. 

After bleaching we slapped on some blonde dye picked up from a chemist, and this was the final result. Now I have to be honest here, this photo is deceptive. The colour looks okay in this shot, but let me assure you that it was not okay. It was yellow. A ginger yellow, like something out of the simpsons. 

Not only that, this yellow gingery hair did not suit my skin tone and made me look... well, ill. And my eyebrows... let's just say, next to the blonde, it looked lie someone had drawn them one with a black marker pen. All that was missing was a twirly mustache.

24 hours after my hair was transformed, I ran into every hairdressers I could find and begged them to fix the mess. Luckily I found one who could, and who agreed to do it for me the very next day. So, £75 later, my hair has been restored back to the colour I started off with. 

Only shorter.  

 So what have I learned from this little hair related disaster? One, that hairdressers charge a lot of fucking money. And two, don't flatter yourself into thinking you can get anything other than a Lisa Simpson hair colour without a professionals help. And lastly, I'm clearly not very good at this whole 'letting the pictures speak for you and sacking off words for pretty pictures' bullshit that other bloggers are so clearly good at. I've rambled on like a twat more than usual. 

Maybe my examiners had a point about my communication skills.

Does The Woman Make The Hair? Or The Hair Make The Woman?

Like many women I have a love, hate relationship with my hair. On the one hand I love my hair. It’s one of my best friends. It keeps my ears warm (or used to, but more on that later), compliments my eyes, and makes me feel... all girly and stuff.

If there’s one thing that helps women define a woman’s femininity, it’s our hair.  In a recent interview with SFX, Gwendoline Christie , the new star of HBO’s Game of Thrones, confines what it meant to chop off her pretty blonde locks.

“When they cut my hair off, the transformation was complete,” she says. “I really, really miss it. When I had it cut I was a good girl on set – I went to my dialogue session and my horse-riding session – then I went to my hotel room, shut the door and sobbed for two hours.”

For Christie, as a six foot three woman, her hair provided her a reassurance of her femininity. It may not be possible for all of us to match up to the small, willowy frames our childhood princesses sported; so we settle for the next best thing – Princess hair. Where would Repunzle be if now if not for her long, following hair? What is Snow White if she doesn’t have her hair black as coal? If there’s one thing that made a Princess a Princess – it was her hair.

However, is Princess hair really do-able, or like the Princesses themselves, is it just a fantasy?

In an ideal world I would have fantastic hair. Long, silky, with just the right amount of volume. I would wake up, run my fingers through it, and leave the house with birds singing around my bouffant mane. When I gave my head a wiggle it would do that thing hair does in adverts, where the sun bounces off it and makes it look like the sun is literally renting a room on top of your head. I would literally be the centre of the solar system. Planets would gravitate around my head – that’s how fantastic my fantasy hair would be.

Is my hair like that? No.

Here's my hair and the lead singer of Dry the River. Notice his hair is longer, also notice how you're (hopefully) not confused who belongs to what gender. 

I have short hair, very short hair. Why? Because in real life, only a select few have Princess hair and one of them is Kate Middleton. The rest of us aren’t capable of having long, silky smooth hair. Our heads just won’t have it. In my case, my hair grew up to my shoulders before having a systematic melt down and leaving split ends all over the place. My hair is also curly, which is a polite term for frizzy. Meaning if I wanted nice hair, I would either have to sit perfectly still for 6 hours and let the bitch dry naturally, or spend an hour burning my face off with strengtheners hot enough to melt steel.

Needless to say, I went with option C and just cut the damn stuff off. And while I would like to say ‘Oh I just felt so liberated, like a Joan of Arc but with hair and stuff’ what I actually felt was sadness. Seeing my hair on the floor I felt exposed, like some kind of shield had been taken away from me. Without hair I had nothing to hide behind. Suddenly I was very conscious of how unisex my pants were, of how they squeeze my hips and gave an ever so slight muffin top. I wanted to put more make up on, change my trainers for high heels – just do something to vindicate my womanhood.

It’s was only later, when I started to lose my preconceived notions of what a woman should look like, that I was able to acknowledge that my hair looked great. For once I wasn’t weighed down by my unmanageable hair. It didn’t six hours to style it, I didn’t feel the need to burn it alive before venturing out in public. And more importantly, I accepted that it suited me.

My eyes looked bigger, it made my cheek bones stand out. Without a mane of hair, I saw that hey, my neck isn’t half bad – it’s long, makes me look like a Jane Austen character.

Now by no means am I suggesting that every woman who reads this blog (hey flatmates) has to go out immediately and cut off all their hair. That would be silly, just look at Kerry Katona. But what I am saying is: don’t be afraid.

If you find yourself on tumblr, doing nothing but stare at pictures of Carey Muligan and moaning ‘God I wish I had hair like that, but it’s just so... short’. Fuck it. Cut it off. Who knows, you might look great – you might look AMAZING! Don’t cling to your princess hair hoping that one day a handsome prince will yank his way up your tresses and affirm your femininity. Newsflash: as women we all have vaginas, long hair or no.

What makes us women, what makes us feminine is what we make it to be. Our identity is unique to us, not to be placed into a category set out for us by fairytale books.

I mean Christ, just think how long Rapunzel has to spend washing that mane. No wonder Disney made her chop it off.