Dying my hair was always something that I wanted to do, but never something that I thought I would do. I used to spray my hair with colored hair spray and color my hair with hair chalk to try and get the desired effect, but my hair is very dark brown, and temporary color works much better on blonde hair. By the time I was old enough to permanently dye my hair, friends and family had convinced me that it wasn’t a road I wanted to go down. I cannot count the number of times someone told me that my “natural color was perfect.” I do like my natural hair color, as far a brown goes my hair is a nice brown, but sometimes I do think it’s boring. And maybe my childhood of watching anime has influenced me more than I know, but I love brightly colored hair. When I was in elementary school I was enamored with the hair of a friend’s older sister because it was unnaturally red.
Yet dyeing my hair was not something that I was ready to commit to. I resigned myself to the fact that it was probably something that I would never do, or that it was something to do when I was older or when I had the time, but I was really just making excuses for myself. I even began to be sort of proud of my virgin, never-dyed hair, which seems silly now. Lots of people have virgin hair, it’s not by any means rare, and I am constantly growing new hair, it’s not like a have a finite amount of the stuff, so I’m honestly not sure what I was holding onto by not dyeing my hair.
And then I had a realization recently. I'm going to be applying for internships and possibly going on job interviews soon, and it's generally agreed that it's better to go on interviews with some form of natural hair color, so if I wanted any sort of unnatural colored hair, it was now or never. My initial instinct was go big or go home, but I had time restrictions on the number of bleaching sessions I could commit to (and pay for) and I knew that I did not want to dye my hair for the first time on my own. So I pretty much told the stylist to do what she though was best and doable in one session. Because I did tell her that I would be doing interviews soon, we decided on some pretty subtle streaks, and thus far I'm thinking that I might not even need to dye it back for interviews.
As a newbie to hair dye I learned a lot from this experience, but there were five things overall that I didn't really expect.
1. Hair dye is addictive
I'm not sure why this surprised me. The same thing happens with piercings and tattoos, so why would hair be any different? I just thought that dyeing my hair would get it out of my system and I'd be over it, but now its like, "it's already bleached anyway, might as well keep going." I want to dye my whole head so badly now, I think blue would be pretty cool.2. People think that color is a free pass to touch your hair
I sort of did expect this one, but it still baffles me when people come right up to me and grab a strand of hair exclaiming that it's purple. Yes, I know it's purple, I did not know that all this time I should have been greeting people by petting them and telling them their hair color. Actually, I’m pretty okay with being pet and told that some of my hair is purple, but just be warned that not everyone is cool with it.
3. The color will transfer
I was aware that the color would bleed in the shower for the first few days, I was not aware that purple would get on EVERYTHING ELSE. I turned a couple of pillowcases purple, the collar of my shirt is purple now. It's a pretty good thing that I like purple.
4. There are people who just won't understand (and they might judge you)
College campuses are pretty accepting places. Students express themselves openly in any manner they choose and we pretty much don't bat an eyelash. The rest of the world is not so nice. Even though hair-dye is fairly commonplace today, there are still people, who will look at your nontraditional hair color and as why in the world you would do that. My advice is to ignore them.
