The New Rules for Blondes (10 page)

Do you have any funny blonde anecdotes?

The only two people I know who’ve accidentally opened doors into their own heads are me and my blonde roommate. (Mine was luckily not bad, but she gave herself a concussion!)

Elizabeth E. (cool, platinum-blonde Cate Blanchett look-alike)

What’s your worst hair disaster?

My worst hair disaster occurred in my early twenties when I moved to California and discovered that apartment complexes like Melrose Place really do exist! I was hanging with a hottie I met at a party one night, and he suggested we take our private party down to the pool. We stripped down for some skinny-dipping (which I’m sure his neighbors and the other partygoers totally appreciated), and all was fun and games until it was time to dry off and rejoin the group. Getting out of the pool, my super-fine blonde hair knotted up into some serious tangles, and I realized I didn’t have any way to comb them out. My crush playfully tried to run his fingers through my wet hair, and his hand literally got stuck in my chlorine-induced snarls. I had no choice but to rejoin the party with a swamp mess on my head. From that day on, I’ve always been sure to carry a brush in my bag!

Do you have a colorist in your life, or do you color at home?

I’m not faithful to any one colorist. I go through phases of letting my highlights lapse because I’ve convinced myself that I can return to my natural strawberry-blonde color from high school, then realizing I can’t and running back to the salon for a new burst of blonde. Vicious cycle.

Do you love life as a blonde?

Yes! Every once in a while I fantasize about going deep red à la Lauren Holly from the ’90s and
Dumb and Dumber
fame, but I love being bright and blonde.

Do you have any funny blonde anecdotes?

This happened to me, I’ll just come out and say it. I once boarded the wrong plane by mistake. The airline had changed the gate, and I didn’t hear the change because I was listening to my headphones. When I did turn off the music and tune in, the flight was boarding. I waited patiently for my zone number (it was the last to board) and then gave the attendant my boarding pass. I made it all the way to my seat at the back of the plane when a panicked announcement came over the speakers: “Attention, passenger Elizabeth E. You have boarded the wrong plane. Please de-plane immediately. Repeat—you are on the wrong plane.” Mortified, I turned and began making the slow climb upstream back towards the front of the plane, enduring the stares and ridicule from my fellow passengers. I heard one guy snigger, “Figures she’s a blonde.”

Glennis M. (blonde who isn’t afraid to change it up and experiment)

What’s your worst hair disaster?

Worst hair disaster was the pixie cut/orange glow I rocked for a while around age twenty-one. It’s still the photo on my driver’s license because, as much as I hate that photo, I am way too impatient to stand in line for a new photo. (This is the year my license expires, so you better believe I’ll be getting my roots done before.)

When did you first go blonde?

I honestly couldn’t tell you when I went blonde. Because my mom’s a hairdresser, I’ve been doing crazy things to my hair my whole life!

Do you have a colorist in your life, or do you color at home?

I have a colorist in my life, and he’s the only man for me. Because my mom was a hairdresser, finding someone to do my hair in New York was not easy. I think that’s something that a lot of women experience. Why is that? Anyway, my hairstylist does my hair in his home. He’s one of my friends from high school who now lives here, and though he doesn’t officially do hair anymore, he will always do mine. He’s fantastic. Not only do I trust him completely with taking me from dark brunette to light blonde, we sing show tunes after he’s done. It’s pretty fantastic.

Do you love life as a blonde?

I loved life as a brunette, and I love life as a blonde. Being a blonde turns all eyes to you when you walk in a room, and what’s not to love about that?

CHAPTER 10

RULE:
Spend Some Time on the Dark Side

T
here exist an inordinate number of quotes about how one must accept and embrace change. These crop up in high school yearbooks, song lyrics, and greeting cards. They inform us that while “everybody’s changing and I don’t know why” (Keane), “time may change me, but I can’t trace time” (David Bowie), and that “that’s just the way it is, things will never be the same/somethings will never change” (Bruce Hornsby or Tupac Shakur depending on which version you prefer). Change is inevitable in life, and what better way to embrace it than through personal aesthetics, specifically hair color?

Supermodel Linda Evangelista is the patron saint of drastic hair changes. She’s a style chameleon, and while such severe changes initially cost her runway jobs, they have become her signature. When Evangelista was a young model in the late 1980s, she cut off her long hair in favor of a pageboy-style haircut and was promptly dropped from all of her runway shows that season. Within months she was featured on numerous magazine covers, her short haircut garnered a lot of buzz, and Evangelista became a style inspiration to many women. Her natural hair color is dark brown, but she has rocked every cut and color imaginable: fierce red, blonde, light brown, and a more natural red. Evangelista was a member of the first class of bona fide supermodels (the others were Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer, and the hugely underrated Karen Mulder) but the only one to play with vastly different looks. No wonder she was tapped to be the spokeswoman for L’Oréal Paris, peddling their myriad hair color kits.

In her wake, many celebrities have embraced the color chameleon life, including Madonna, P!nk, Cameron Diaz, Britney Spears, Gwen Stefani, and Emma Stone. Hair color experimentation has been represented in music, film, and television, too. Who can forget the
Brady Bunch
episode when Jan was sick of just being Marcia’s equally blonde and long-haired little sister, so she donned an Afro wig and insisted that this look was “the new Jan Brady.” Or in the first
Sex and the City
film, when Carrie goes brunette and says that her “head is in the witness protection program” after her bridal fashion spread in
Vogue
and subsequent break-up with Big. Or in the 1985 Carly Simon song “Tired of Being Blonde.”

Moving from blonde life to a brunette existence is not to be taken lightly. As a woman with blonde hair, you are often assumed to be a floozy and a ditz, but when you go darker, you are often perceived as smart and perhaps mysterious.

The hair color chameleon can end up feeling like a fish out of water when she experiments with different hair color, and she may be surprised at her newfound identity and its associated preconceptions. But it is nonetheless valuable to live the experience of the brunette or dark-haired woman, to sympathize with her plight. As a blonde, you are undoubtedly used to getting attention and catching eyes wherever you go, but this life experience isn’t universal. It’s a worthwhile undertaking to experience life “on the dark side.”

You may be thinking,
This book is called
The New Rules for Blondes
. How is a new rule for blonde life to not be blonde anymore!?
I admire your spunk and understand your quandary. My answer is this: It’s always valuable to walk a mile in another person’s shoes (and by “shoes” I mean hair). While being blonde is a delight, we shouldn’t be fearful of experimentation and we should be eager to try out different looks. If you have blue or green eyes, then a rich, dark hair color can make your eyes pop. Additionally, your new hair color and hair-eye combo will allow you to dress in colors that were perhaps unflattering when you were a blonde. I once dallied in a brunette existence, experiencing life through that dark-haired lens. I learned a lot about myself and the world around me. Like a rite of passage that is difficult when you’re in the thick of the drama and trauma but ends up being a character-building personal challenge (changing schools, trying out for the sports team, bra shopping for the first time), life as a brunette was something that was tough at the time but that I now look back on with fondness. I learned firsthand that I can navigate through life’s challenges whether I’m blonde or brunette, even when one of life’s challenges is
that
I’m a brunette.

When I jumped on Team Brunette, it was late 2000 and Cameron Diaz had just dyed her hair dark brown post–
Charlie’s Angels
. She appeared on the cover of
Cosmopolitan
’s January 2000 issue (on newsstands in early December), which I found myself staring at while I waited in line at the grocery store. Her sultry chocolate-hued sophistication infected my brain with the flawed logic that “if Cameron Diaz looks good as a brunette, then I probably would, too.” It didn’t occur to me that this was a magazine cover that undoubtedly had been carefully lit and photographed for maximum flattery and, on top of all that, the photo was inevitably retouched. Of course Cameron Diaz looked gorgeous as a brunette. And so would I, right?

These flights of fancy are dangerous for me, as I tend to think that what’s good for a wealthy celebrity is probably good for a civilian like me. Note: This is the goal of advertising in general. Damn you,
Mad Men
! This phenomenon also occurred during the spring of my senior year in college and resulted in a lot of bizarre photos of yours truly. Around that time, I read an interview with our old pal, hair color chameleon Linda Evangelista, in which she explained that she poses and smiles with her mouth slightly open because a photographer recommended that move to her back when she was a young model. It makes sense for her proportions and the shape of her chin and it has becoming something of her signature move when being photographed (like Tyra Banks’s signature move of “smizing,” or smiling with her eyes). Smiling as if caught in the act, with her mouth every-so-slightly ajar is a fantastic maneuver for Linda Evangelista. I do not have model-like features, and I am not Linda Evangelista (though I loved her work in the video for George Michael’s “Freedom”—she was trapped in a virtual jail made of sweater!), but during the spring months of 2002, whenever a camera was pointed in my direction, I was smiling with my mouth open. Because I should do whatever Linda Evangelista does, right?

And so it was with Cameron Diaz in late 2000. I was about to leave the United States for a semester of study abroad in London (and an imminent twenty-pound weight gain thanks to a steady diet of curry fries and Strongbow Cider), and I was ready for a change. Cameron Diaz’s blue eyes popped from beneath her new dark-haired locks, so I knew it would make my blue eyes pop, too. And so I drove to Newbury Street in downtown Boston for a visit with a man who served as my mother’s colorist, unlicensed recreational therapist, and spiritual guide, John. You know that your family has a hair obsession when your mother’s hairdresser is a distinguished guest at all of your family weddings. John’s a wise man, and I think he sensed that I wanted to experience life as a brunette, but he knew that I wasn’t ready for all that brown-haired life entails (actually being given speeding tickets and not just warnings and flirtation, not being stared at in bars, not being treated like a rare flower, wearing a lot of jewel-toned shirts, etc.). So he pushed me to go light brown and ease into the brunette experience. We got through the time-consuming single process, and I emerged as a brunette, albeit a light brunette. But I wasn’t happy. I’ve always been like Ado Annie from the musical
Oklahoma!
With me it’s all or nothing. Let’s either be platinum or dark brown, but nothing in between. If you’re going to go brunette, go all the way. I still believe this. Either go big or go home. You’ve got to bet big to win big and all that jazz.

Within a few days, I found myself back in the colorist’s chair and John dutifully gave me what I wanted, despite his warnings that bright blonde to dark brown is an extreme change and I would probably, ultimately be unhappy with the severity of the color shift. By nightfall, I possessed a head of dark-brown hair and my friends and family looked me straight in the face and didn’t even recognize me. This is a side effect that you must prepare for—post–color change, friends and family will literally make eye contact with you and not quite process that it’s you. At the time I thought this might be enthralling—to see what it was like from the other side of things.
This could be fun!
I thought. Immediately, I found that I needed to catch my reflection in every mirrored surface possible to see my new hair—to fully see what the new Selena looked like.
Wow—that’s different,
I anxiously thought every time I saw myself. I had a little hitch in my heart and an odd feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Well, Selena, this is the new look that you wanted,
I thought as I tried to digest the fact that the sunlight wasn’t hitting golden highlights anymore. I had to go with it, though—I had gone this far over to the dark side—I had made a choice that I had to live with. I’d imagine that my feeling was similar to that of a woman who says yes to a marriage proposal despite some misgivings. She walks down the aisle thinking,
It will be fine. We’ve already embraced this decision and gotten this far down the track—there is no turning back. It will be fine . . . I hope.
And without quite knowing what was happening, I began grieving the loss of my blondeness.

I fell asleep that night as a brunette for the first time ever. When I awoke the next morning, I cracked my eyes open ever so slightly to see brown hair in my face. You know when you’re still half-asleep and not completely aware of what is going on? If you’re staying in a hotel, it’s the half second during which your brain processes the jump from “Where am I? Huh? This ceiling looks weird” to “Oh yeah, I’m not in my bed—I’m at a hotel.” Well, in that half second, in my head I thought to myself,
Ewww—there’s a brunette in my bed.
Then I came to and realized: that brunette was
me
.
44
I felt like Tom Hanks when he first gets big in the movie
Big
. He gets exactly what he wished for, but as Metallica says, “Careful what you wish, you may regret it. Careful what you wish, you just might get it.” Perhaps John the colorist was right: I shouldn’t have jumped so eagerly into the deep end of the proverbial brunette swimming pool.

This move over to the dark side took place a few days before New Year’s Eve. On that first brunette day in late December 1999, I decided to take my new brown hair for a spin and met up with Suzanne for drinks that evening. She had been at the hairdresser that same day and was experimenting with a funky, new haircut that wasn’t so much “funky” as it was a mullet. A freaky lady mullet.

But Suzanne and I had both wanted something totally new and different, and the novelty of my brown hair and her mullet still hadn’t worn off. At the bar, we played pool, drank some bad domestic beer, and gingerly danced around the fact that we were both beginning to regret our drastic hair changes. “It’s cool to try something new, ya know? Right?” I asked her, as though I had simply purchased an edgy new shirt for a night on the town—not dropped a ton of cash and hours on hair that was now, seemingly, stuck this way. “Yeah, I mean, if I don’t like this I can always just cut if off and go pretty short, and you can dye your hair back . . . it’s fun!” Suzanne halfheartedly agreed while attempting to toss her newly shorn hair. The mullet mantra of “business up front, party in the back” played out on Suzanne’s head with the hair toss, as the “business” didn’t move much but the “party” swayed gently. We were both up to our ears in denial, the first stage of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous model of the five stages of grief. And we were both grieving hard: Suzanne for her non-mullet hair and me for my blonde hair. We were in the thick of denial, and we didn’t even know it. As I like to joke, denial ain’t just a river in Egypt: It’s also a powerful defense mechanism in which you refuse to accept the reality of a given situation.

The guy I had been seeing at the time, Eric, was hosting a big New Year’s Eve party at his place, which was a post- collegiate faux fraternity house. On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, I gave him a call to tell him my hair color news (because everyone cares!) and confirm plans for that night’s festivities. He didn’t seem very excited about the news that I was now a brunette, and I tried to play it off as a wacky, impulsive decision that could only come from a super-chill party girl who will try anything once (spicy!). Eric got off the phone quickly, saying that he and his housemates had to run out and buy beer for the party and that he would call me back. Then a few hours passed without a call, so I decided to call his house. This was back in the days of landlines and the potential for you to be away from your phone. The dark ages. Eric wasn’t at the house, allegedly, so I spoke to one of his housemates and left a message. An hour later, I still hadn’t heard from him, so I called again.
45
Another one of Eric’s housemates answered. I could just sense that I was getting the runaround and his friend’s insistence that Eric was “still at the packie”
46
had to be bullshit. How much time can you spend at a liquor store!? Finally, I laughed on the phone with one roommate and sarcastically said, “He’s
still
at the liquor store, huh? Well, Happy New Year’s to you all. Bye.” It was nine p.m. on New Year’s Eve, and now I had no plans. Things were looking bleak.

After making a few last-minute phone calls, I rang in the New Year at a friend-of-a-friend’s house party, where I spent most of the night talking to a random high school girl about how much she hated high school. I feel an odd sense of obligation to listen to angsty teen girls because nobody ever listened to me during those high school years of misery. So I sat there and paid it forward, listening to this stranger’s onslaught of gripes and complaints about the misery and boredom of high school. In the back of my mind, I kept thinking that there must have been a miscommunication with Eric. He must be trying to reach me and furiously calling my parents’ house, right? Or was he just a complete jerk? Why had his feelings changed so completely and so suddenly? That night, as the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1999, the world didn’t explode into some Y2K mushroom cloud of bad computer data as everyone had predicted. Something worse happened: I was stood up. And a brunette.