Live and Learn

There is one important lesson I have learned over the past two weeks of my life: I should NOT color my hair at home with products from CVS.

I'll start at the beginning for you.

I have started to get gray hairs, at the age of 30. I actually starting getting them at 28. Perfect excuse to get my hair colored the way I choose! For a few years, I have been going to the salon, having my hair colored a bit darker than my medium brown, and getting highlights. Sometimes a caramel color, sometimes with a bit of red- fun stuff. But as of late, it was getting so expensive to keep it up. The highlights look great for about an month, and then blah.

Over the Summer, I decided to go to the salon and have the highlights taken out, and just go to a single very dark brown color.

Forward to the Fall. I (literally) run into this stranger down at the Muni Lot tailgating for a Browns game, and LOVE her hair color. I immediately tell her, and then I find out she is totally drunk, and wants to get into a whole conversation about it. Well, due to her high level of beer intake, she must have told me at least 20 times that it was "L'Oreal Perfect 10 Dark Brown".

Here I am on the road, needing to cover up these grays, so I think back on my drunken conversation with Browns girl, and go to CVS to buy her perfect hair color in a bottle. A friend of mine on tour came to my room and two weeks ago, and we dumped two bottles of it on my hair. I wash it, dry it, and ut oh- the bottom of my hair is practically black, and the roots didn't even take! I was so bummed out. A friend who used to work in a salon said he might be able to fix the roots with another bottle of the stuff, but I was just over it.

I then became paranoid girl. In my mind, everyone was looking at my light roots. At the same time, I also had a large curling iron burn on my neck. I was so paranoid that when a man looked at me and said, "child, what did you do to yourself"? I thought, oh god! Even he noticed my hair! Duh- he was asking about the burn.

Last weekend in Richmond, VA, I went to a salon and the dude told me it was going to be a corrective color, and he charged $50 an hour. Three to four hours, so $200. Yea, right! Long story short, I visited a few salons here in D.C. and found a wonderful older woman who was no frills, and she fixed me for $75.

Moral of my story is that cheaper is not always better. It wound up costing me about $120 to make my hair brown!