Monday Jan 03, 2011

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Welcome to 2011! I hope you all had wonderful holidays.


So, I'm seriously conflicted.

I am contemplating chopping all my hair off and letting it regrow my natural color.


Facts about me:

a) In some ways, I suck at being a girl. I'm bad at doing hair and makeup, and I rarely feel like putting in the effort to do them. I thought about it the other day - the number of days in a year I actually put on makeup probably amounts to about 2 weeks.

I was telling one of my best friends (who, since she was 12, would not leave the house without putting makeup on) that, for me, making that sort of effort feels vain and unnecessary. I don't think that about the women who do bother, I just personally dislike the thought of standing in front of the mirror every morning for an hour to get ready. It's sad, because I really like nice hair and makeup on other girls, and even wish I could be that way myself. But it doesn't feel like me to do all that. I feel weird when I have makeup on.

b) I have never been particularly attached to my hair, or cared all that much about what I looked like, so I would fuck around with my hair, changing it constantly. I don't know that I can explain why, maybe it was (slash still is?) an identity-seeking thing for me. Or maybe it was my tame way of rebelling since I was never interested in drugs/drinking/partying/typical teenage troublemaking.

c) I get my hair cut at cheap walk-in places and dye my hair myself. Pretty much always have. You get the picture. I wanna change the way I look, but I don't fucking care to spend the time/effort/money.


Mere's Epic Hair History

SPOILERS! (Click to view)

When I was really little I had super blonde hair, with these amazing loose curls at the ends. But, apparently, I had this problem that - if it was long enough - I'd stick my hair in my mouth and chew/suck on it. So my mom chopped it all off.

I don't have pictures from my childhood with me (my parents have them all), but since then and for as long as my mom was deciding my haircut it was very short. I had a perm in 2nd grade. I had a bowl-cut for a while. It was awesome.

Eventually, I got old enough to not chew on my hair when it was long, and I grew it out.

This is me, age 13, with my grown-out hair before I started screwing with it. (9th grade school pic)


At age 14, I convinced one of my best friends to dye my hair for me so we headed down the street to K-Mart and picked up some L'Oreal.


Then I cut it. Though it's fairly close to my natural color, I liked to dye it a bit lighter and brighten it up.


Then I cut it more and looked like a fucking idiot. This is when I was 15, I think. Still dyed, I'm pretty sure.


Then I cut it even more when I was 16, getting rid of all the dye. (So did my BFF from high school, which prompted the rumors about us being lesbian lovers.) I liked this hair cut, though...probably because it was one of those basically effortless styles.


But, I got tired of that within half a year and decided to grow it out again. Me, in one of my senior pics, age 16:


I spent a while growing it back out, dying it again (and again, and again) to be something other than a bland, dull and ugly dark dishwater blonde. Me, age 18:


Then I cut it. Age 18, about 2 months after the last picture was taken:


I spent a long while dying it various shades of blonde and brown and cutting it into different styles, but keeping it pretty short. I looked stupid a lot of the time because I was using box dyes and didn't understand anything about hair color. I'd (of course) get some really bizarre results which would then force me to promptly re-dye. I was killing my hair.

In this picture (age 20), you can't really tell, but my hair was really dry and damaged despite my best conditioning efforts. But, I like the cut quite a bit (though it takes effort as my hair isn't actually straight like that...)


Then I started gettin' all kinds of crazy with unnatural colors. Which meant bleaching that box dye shit out of my hair (hah!). This is a couple months after that last picture:


And a few months later:


The next month:


As you can see, I am lazy and I'd let the semi-permanent dyes fade until it looked horrible before re-dying. But nonetheless, I was dying my hair a lot, changing colors frequently. So, the next time I tried bleaching and re-dying I melted my hair and had to chop it.

I tried to be festive for Christmas, though:


Re-dyed again a month later:


And again:


And then, when I was 21, I lost a bet (a card game - I'm serious) and cut it all the fuck off. I mean, total cue-ball. I don't have pictures of that because I hated it, but this is what it looked like a couple weeks later:


Grew it out.


Added color again and got naked on the web:


Me, age 22, hair dyed again:


Let it grow.


Added more color, got naked again (age 23):


Finally, I went black:


Got a cut I loved


And, aside from adding some color to the bangs for a while...




...I've just been pretty much maintaining the color and letting it grow like that for almost two years. Because I really, really like it.




Thing is, my hair is becoming difficult to manage. I wash it every other day instead of every day because it's dry. I use a strong conditioner every time I wash my hair. But it's often still frizzy and poofy. A LOT of hair accumulates on the drain every shower, a lot comes out in my combs and brushes.... it's disgusting.

I think it's partially an age thing... I read that in her mid-20s, a woman's hair grows & replaces itself faster than at any other time in her life. But also, I feel like my hair is thinning out a bit (not in any horribly noticeable way, but still....the genetics are there in my family for that). And, it's obviously damaged. I mean, it's understandable, I've been fucking with it for 11 years almost non-stop, except for maybe 6 months when I was 16 and then not quite a year when I was 21/22.



I've wanted to have long hair for a while. Right now, it's as long as it's ever been, but that's really only a bit past my shoulders. But with all the damage, I feel it doesn't look good and it's difficult to deal with, and probably won't even get much longer. So I want to regrow it and just go natural.


But...

I really hate the re-growing process. There's no way to avoid looking stupid for many parts of it. If I do decide to do this, I will have to commit to going to a real stylist often, though, to get it shaped into something that will grow out for a little bit without looking completely ridiculous.

I don't know that I can promise myself to be patient enough to let it grow naturally, without wanting to change it again. Which pretty much defeats the whole purpose.

I adore having black hair. I feel more confident and sexy with it, and I think that's partly because people actually notice me. (Even though my family hates the black hair, everyone else who's said anything really likes it on me.)

I've kept my hair like this for almost two years for a reason - it's BY FAR the longest I've kept any look.

Mostly, I realized last night while laying awake in bed... I am really, really afraid of looking plain again.


But in other ways, I'm kind of excited for a new change. Even though I love my hair the way it is....that urge to do something else with it has resurfaced...


I feel dumb to even be thinking about this so much. It's just fucking hair. Why am I so conflicted about it? I can barely explain what's going on in my mind with all this.


*sigh* I just don't know.


Any input?

VIEW 8 of 8 COMMENTS
melted:
I don't think I can help, but I think natural would be a good color to try.
vanceowen:
Don't do anything until you've settled on your next look. Know what you want instead of what you don't.

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