There used to be a huge social stigma attached to a woman who colored her hair. Today I think most women color their hair at least once during their lifetime. I know I have (I added the wrong shade of red, it didn’t look good). Yet there is still a lingering social stigma for women who choose to “go blonde.” Blonde hair is equated with youth and sexiness. Darker hair is equated with intelligence and stability. Therefore women who chose to change from dark hair to blonde hair must have some insecurity for which they’re trying to compensate.
I consider myself both intelligent and stable. I don’t do sexy very well, I’d much rather be classy than sexy. At 33 years old I don’t qualify as old yet, but I’m not exactly young either. In short my personality traits are all those which tend to be associated with dark hair, yet I’m a natural blonde.
Part of me is very pleased to be a natural blonde. There is a voice in the back of my brain which insists that because my blonde is natural it is somehow superior to the blonde of someone who colors. This is the same part of my brain which is frustrated looking around at all the blonde people and knowing that most of them wouldn’t be blonde without chemicals. That part of my brain is convinced that to be blonde is special and rare and everyone would know how special and rare it is if only everyone else would stop pretending to be blonde when they’re not.
Then the rest of my brain stifles the annoying voice and hopes that none of those thoughts ever made it into my face. But I wonder if I have these thoughts, do people ever look at my blonde hair at assume that I have chosen to be blonde? If they do, then what do they assume about me based on my choice of hair color? In truth, I am deciding to be blonde. I could very easily color my hair to be something else. But then I’d be plagued with light roots and the expense of maintaining my hair color. My hair is natural because anything else is too high maintenance. So I guess I’m blonde because I’m lazy. Somehow I doubt that is the conclusion anyone else would come to about my hair color.
I have more thoughts, but they’re too scattered to capture right now. I’ll have to wait for them to sort themselves out. It’s taken years for the above thoughts to be sorted even this far. Probably because I just don’t spend much time thinking about it.
You’re not blonde because you’re lazy. You’re blonde because you’re CHEAP. 😉
In 1995, I colored my hair to make myself stand out in a roomful of geeks. I was hosting a tournament as part of a convention. I chose a blend of red and chestnut that came out to a deep plum color, which seemed perfect…
…until I saw the lounge where my tournament had been assigned. I asked them to turn the lights on, and the facilities guy said, “That’s as high as they get.”
I was practically invisible.
That’s amusing. The one time I had my hair colored, I wanted the result to look something like your natural hair color (as I remember it) instead I got ketchup streaks through blonde. Not what I’d pictured.
That too. 🙂
I colored my hair – well, okay, my sister colored it for me – as part of a costume a few years back. I wanted a reddish-brown color, something vaguely natural-looking. The color on the box was what I wanted, and my sister – having more experience coloring her hair than I, having gone through five colors in the previous two years – managed to convince me that my hair ought to be bleached first. The bleaching came out uneven – bright off-white at my roots, down to a slightly lighter shade of my natural color at the tips, two feet away (my hair’s been long for quite some time), and the coloring made the top of my head fire-engine red, and what ended up being my ponytail more of a natural red-brown.
Wasn’t so much of a problem for the anime convention, but I did end up coloring it brown (okay, reddish-brown, but at least natural) a couple months later for the elf costume in my icon, with the nice side-effect of having it a normal color for my friend’s wedding the next month.
Now that’s a lucky man. Publically calls his wife a cheap blonde and gets away with it.
🙂
I hope you mean in the ‘very fiscally responsible’ way, Howard. }:D
Mind you, I knew quite a few blondes who had more head on their shoulders than I do now… although they too had a fun time playing with other people’s heads, given their hair color’s considered less than… intelligent.
Sandra’s probably too good a person to engage in such behavior, of course. 😀
I seem to be strange in that I’ve never coloured my hair. For starters I’d probably have to bleach it and that’s scary, but really I just like my hair. I used to get annoyed because I felt that guys would write me off as being plain and boring with my dark hair and their eyes would naturally go to blondes and redheads. A caucasian brunette was someone to settle for, not to hope for 🙂
I remember being surprised for some reason when I found out you were a blonde after talking to you online. Not sure if that’s because of the stereotype of blondes vs. brunettes.
I’ve been coloring my hair for years – to my natural dark brown. 🙂 I started to go grey when I was in my early thirties.
I think most people can tell a natural blonde from bleached/dyed blonde hair. The texture of the hair is different.
When my husband starting going to school (before we met)his mom told him that there were plenty of nice blondes to date.
Maybe that’s why she doesn’t like me? 🙂
I’ve discovered that my hair is supernaturally healthy and will not take to bleaching, coloring or perms. Perhaps it just has a mind of it’s own and I’ve learned to let it do what it wants.
(anyone else read a short story about a magic hair mousse that made a girl’s hair talk to her? It was vain and wanted to be brushed all the time. Her boyfriend accidentally ate some and his stomach started talking to him…)
He’s earned the right to tease me in public by providing years of respect and support.
But yes he’s lucky. 🙂
I’ve never dyed my hair; the closest I’ve come is halloween goop that’s more like paint and washes out in one shower.
One of my friends once said, “That’s your natural color? I thought you dyed it” to me.
I couldn’t help laughing. “Oh yeah, I picked this color. Went to the store and picked me up a bottle of Clairol Mousy Brown(tm)! Woo!”
I actually kinda like my natural hair color — it’s got nice gold highlights in bright light — but I can’t imagine anyone would pick this sort of not-blonde-not-brown hair color, if they were going to go to the trouble of dyeing in the first place. 🙂
I’ve always been worried about damaging my hair if I dyed it. I could probably dye it dark brown/black with something temporary that wouldn’t damage it. But I’ve never been that tempted.
Besides, it’s expensive and requires energy, and I am cheap and lazy.