There’s No Such Thing as Natural Beauty

Blog subtitle for the day: The things we do when AT&T has a problem with my high-speed DSL line and my internet isn’t functioning, and I can’t do work, or surf the web, or read blogs, or check my MySpace, or do anything even remotely productive or entertaining.

My sister is in cosmetology school and a few weeks ago at a wedding, we talked about coloring my hair. My hair is brown. Just brown. No highlights, no nothing. Brown. I wanted to add some red to it, maybe make it more of a mahogany color – keeping the brown with some pep to it, without being that fakey red cherry Koolaid color. We decided today was the day.

First stop on our adventure: Starbucks. (What? Are you NEW here? Of COURSE we stopped at Starbucks). I had a buy one get one coupon, and never usually buy two coffees at once – so a gingerbread latte for me and a white chocolate peppermint mocha for sis. Problem? This is the same Starbucks that made me that gruesome gingerbread latte previously. I think their sugar-free gingerbread syrup is just wrong. And… they left the peppermint out of Sister’s mocha. I ended up dumping most of my drink out the window. It was horrible.

Next stop: the beauty supply store. First, we browsed nail polish colors. I love that my sis gets a discount on this stuff – OPI nail polish was half price. We had to pick up some “I’m Not Really a Waitress” for my mom’s Christmas stocking. We found a few other shades (including one for me, which I’m sporting on my toenails – Mrs. O’Leary’s BBQ). Onward to the hair color. We flipped through the creepy hair swatches, and my Sis being conservative decides we should maybe mix two colors together – a brown undertone (Walnut) with a red on top (Sangria). We then wander around some more, get some other stuff (including Redken Glass which rocks when you’ve straightened your hair). Sis is the queen of Hair Product. She just is. We were there quite some time, but what fun. My kids had a blast, for some reason, they were oinking like pigs all the way through the store. Whatever keeps them happy!

Back home we went. I prepped some lunch for the kiddos and Sis started painting my hair with the color. Her gloves looked like she had been butchering something, and the bowl of color just looked like a hemmorrhage. I was actually worried it might be too red, and she kept saying, “Don’t worry – it always looks redder in the bowl.” In the midst of the hair painting, AT & T’s repair guy showed up. Sis answered the door, red dye all over and the man looked at her like, “Oh my god, what did I just walk into!?” I wandered to the door, all snazzy with my goopy hair and a smock and spoke to him about my internet issues (to which he informed me that it’s NOT my line like the idiot customer representatives have been trying to tell me, but in fact it’s a bigger problem that is affecting many people and they will fix it! Pronto!).

We paint. I sit. We rinse and wash. And voila.

You can’t see the difference.

Actually, if you can see ANY difference, my hair looks to be a darker brown. It’s like that line in the movie Beaches (You know you saw it), “You just spent two hours dyeing your hair the same color?” After the hair cut fiasco last October, I know Sis was being uber-conservative because she didn’t want to ruin my hair again. She’ll be back on Saturday with more Sangria. No Walnut. It’s definitely not ruined, and I’m fine with it – it’s just so laughable that we spent all that time and it’s very subtle. Like so subtle, why bother?! Ah well.