It’s Pride Month! Time to Get Your Rainbow Hair

At around the 16-month mark from my last haircut (Oh. My. Pandemic!), I decided to dye my hair myself.

You see, a couple of decades ago, I fell in love with a woman I have never met. She walked through a city square in a small town in France, laughing with friends. A streak of hot pink whipped through this woman’s otherwise-silver hair, and I instantly worshiped her. Who needs red hats when you could have a pink streak?! The audacity and brilliance of that mark stamped itself into the soft gray matter of my brain. For the remainder of our trip down the Canal du Midi, we called our barge “The Pink Streak.” I vowed that, when my hair lost its color, I would dye it with the same sort of brilliant colors. Streaks of purple, teal, fuchsia, red, and pink-pink-pink!

When I was an old woman, I would dye my hair purple!

Before we progress, you should know that my hair is still, even in my 51st year, naturally brown. Not one gray hair, not even the chin hairs, dammit! My hair DNA descends from my father who, despite a long white beard resembling Santa Claus, reveals still dark brown hair when he removes his ubiquitous ball cap.

While this blessing, along with that layer of fat that keeps the wrinkles plumped out, makes me appear younger than my age, I still yearned for bright color. In 2018, I decided I was tired of waiting for my hair to turn gray in order to dye it. And, while I may be a cheap-o about most other things, my hair is not one of them. In a carefully scheduled moment of joy, my masterful stylist bleached and then dyed a purple streak in my hair.

I love it. I am in love with that streak of color in my hair. When I look at myself in the mirror, that streak of color makes my heart thrum with joy. “Who is that fantastic person with the cheeky purple streak?” I fall in love all over again.

And no amount of ridicule can change my feeling. My boss at the woodshop, NOT a pink streak sort of woman, tried to ignore it. Giving up on that strategy, she invited a close friend and colleague to visit, and he proclaimed it similar to what his 16-year-old daughter would do to her hair.

I preened when he left my office because 16-year-old girls give a flying flip about fashion. Even though the original streak was sighted in France in 1999, my streak still retained its chicness!

My streak alternated between purple and pink and teal. I kept a backup bottle of purple hair dye to touch up the streak, and we re-bleached me out every other dying visit. Our system kept me a creative bohemian!

But then, the pandemic and the lockdown. I avoided the hair salon with its possibility of infection until I could get vaccinated. Throughout the entire germ-ridden time, a pair of sewing shears rid me of my dead ends while my hair grew from darn short to shoulder-length. The brilliant haircut that my stylist bestowed upon me escorted me through the “growing out” wave with grace. While my hair did invade my eye space for a time, there wasn’t a moment when it really looked bad. All credit to her for that!

During those 16 months, my streak faded and descended until only an inch or so of blonde remained. Almost completely brown again, my hair looked at me like I’d lost my damn mind. Every time the mirror caught my eye, “Just a little streak!” it would call to me. “You can do it. I know you can.”

Hmmmm … Maybe I could do it myself.

I studied girls in the grocery store, on the streets, and online, like a young women who’d obviously bleached and colored their own hair with tremendous results. If they could do it, I could do it. I refused further research and grabbed a box of teal hair dye with associated lightener on my next trip to the drugstore.

That box sat on my shelf for weeks. When brushing my teeth after my shower, the ever-so-serious faces of the models taunted me. “What are you afraid of?” Their eyes gleamed.

I would pick up the box and put it back down. “Saturday would be perfect,” I thought. Lots of time for dying hair on Saturday!

Saturdays came and went.

Fear had me by the split ends.

One of the only things I know is that taking action helps to get me out of that scared place. The next Saturday arrived. I decided to go for it.

My mother taught me to be frugal, and I thought I could mix up just a little bit of the lightener at a time, but that was not to be. I had to mix the whole thing at once. Not using up what was given seemed so wrong! But, I didn’t want to dye my whole head. I decided that, in addition to giving myself a bleached little flip on one side, I would give myself another streak on the other side. How hard could it be? I told myself. Children do this.

Children read fashion magazines. Children watch YouTube tutorials.

Children ask for help.

First, how to keep the lightener from bleaching more of my hair than I wanted? When my fabulous stylist bleached and dyed my hair, she would use these thin aluminum foils to isolate small sections.

I could do that! I have aluminum foil!

Using aluminum foil from the kitchen (regular! Heavy duty seemed overkill), I isolated and expanded that little space where my baby flip of a streak remained. I wiped the lightener onto the hair and trapped it, crunching the foil into a ball.

On the opposite side of my head, I grabbed a full section of hair. Wiping on the lightener, I realized that I’d grabbed more than I thought. That would be OK, though. After all, I wanted a streak. If it was a little wider than I really wanted, well, I could make it work!

I balled the next section of my hair up into the foil. Crumpled aluminum spheres bobbed by my ears, and I resembled Oscar the Grouch mid-pop out of his trash can. I wandered around the bedroom, feeling proud of my resourcefulness while reading and making tea until the time came to rinse.

After I cleared the residue of the lightener from my hair, I knew I’d done a bad.

The bleached section with the flip was OK. It wasn’t great, and I wouldn’t be winning any awards for fantastic styling, but it was basically inoffensive.

A giant bleached spot with odd streaks of blonde dribbled down the other side of my head.

Maybe it would look better after it was dyed.

In the drugstore, the teal dye glowed from the shelf. When I tried it with my stylist before, it looked fabulous on me. Plus, teal for the spring, right?!

By the time I was done, one half of my head looked like a teenager trying desperately to be cool and the other side like a 13-year-old boy who’d gotten shot on the side of his head with a paintball. A giant green spot—a spot! How did I manage that?!—sat squarely in the center of the left side of my head.

A headband pulled my hair back and obscured a direct view of the spot, but I knew I was going to have to ‘fess up to my stylist. We had an appointment in two months.

I couldn’t hide forever.

Full marks to her. She did not laugh. She merely looked at me and asked, “Do you want to fix it?”

Yes. Oh, yes, I want to fix it. I laughed and said, “Maybe we could do a rainbow stripe for Pride Month.”

“Really?” She asked, ready to pounce.

“Let’s do it!” I couldn’t believe my audacity, but why not? I’d been trapped in the house with mouse brown hair that everyone approved of, and then made a detour into a crappy dye job. Let’s have a RAINBOW!

Over the course of the next several hours, she bleached and painted while I was her compliant canvas.

At the end of our time together, a rainbow draped around my face with the rest of my head restored to its usual brown. All of the hair stylists gathered before I left, ooohing and aaaahing. The salon took a video, and so did my stylist. I was featured on their Instagram. I felt honored and excited and a little bit famous.

I went home and showed off my new hairdo to all my Facebook friends. Visiting the office that week, my boss remarked that she was surprised I hadn’t ridden my unicorn.

Shows her! My car is my unicorn. I ride her everywhere! Her name is Honoria.

Everyone says they love my rainbow hair, except my boss at the woodshop, but she’s not a rainbow hair sort of person. She was barely a purple streak hair sort of person. All kinds of credit though, because she never invented a dress code and told me I couldn’t have purple hair.

The rainbow stripe exactly matched a skein of sock yarn in my stash, which I immediately knitted into a rainbow cuff with red beads to accentuate the little arches of lace.

I gave it to my stylist to remember the rainbow hair.

I’ll use the rest of the skein to make rainbow socks for myself, a variegated blend of all the colors. Maybe I’ll even add beads on the legs. What?! How fabulous will those be?

Stephanie’s visit to the salon was the next week and, after I dropped her off, I wandered around downtown to do a little networking. As I walked through the door of a shop, two women stopped talking.

“Oh!” one of them said. “Your hair! When you came through the door with the light shining behind you, you looked like an angel!”

I love being the artwork. Anytime an artist uses her paintbrush on me, their love and talent seeps into my skin. Their inspiration transforms me, and I end up beautiful.

Rainbow Up, Folx! Pride Month is here!

Image by LA Bourgeois