On Attention Deficit and Chemical Accidents…

I can’t stop messing with my hair. After approximately 4 weeks (sometimes sooner), my hair becomes intolerable to me and I must alter it somehow. Shorter, slantier, lighter, darker, layered, unlayered, streaky, plain…4 weeks and time for a change.

I make excuses because my husband thinks I’m nuts. He’s right. Here are some of my explanations:

1) See, it takes a long time to style it when it has those layers in the front so I trimmed it to be a little more sleek.
2) See, it takes a long time to style it when it’s all straight like it was, so I layered it… see how it falls more naturally now?
3) It’s much easier to do my make-up when the color is right… Since I darkened it a bit, I feel so much better...more “me.”
4) It was just too dark and plain. I think it looks better with some texture and highlights, don’t you? I look better blonde.
5) I really want to grow it out… I look better when it’s down to my shoulders.
6) I always think it will look better longer, but really, don’t you think my face looks thinner now that my hair is shorter?
7) Etc.

The reality is, I have HADD: Hair Attention Deficit Disorder; the primary symptom is the inability to leave well enough alone. Occasionally, my disorder has resulted in some fantastically stylish hair, most of the time I end up looking not entirely different than I looked before, and a handful of self-stylings have resulted in memorable disasters.

I learn from the disasters. Lession #1: Go to professionals for highlighting (and pretty much any other hair styling but not Super Clips or Great Cuts, because they suck). Now, I admit I’ve had some success with home highlighting kits—especially when my hair stood “raw” and healthy and I had no time constraints or the influence of alcohol. However, I’ve had enough mishaps to rethink the do-it-oneself approach.

Truthfully, home highlighting kits are fun; comparable to those home chemistry kits one gets as a kid but is only allowed to use once because one generates such destruction on the first use that one’s obsessive compulsive mother refuses to clean the sticky artificial apple flavoring off the microwave and the cat ever again.

But now I’m grown up and hair coloring is exciting. So, with much anticipation, I open the box and remove the hair coloring supplies. For some reason, the manufacturers stick the protective gloves to the instructions so one has to peel them off before reading; as if some sort of chemical accident occurred that prompted this method of glove presentation. They don’t trust us to find them with the rest of the supplies.

Most home frosting/highlighting kits contain the following items: Instructions, gloves, a “coloring cap,” a head-sized plastic bag, 2 hooks (metal and plastic), a mixing tub, a stir paddle, a packet of powder, a bottle of white liquid, a tube of gel, a tube of “toner,” and a tube of conditioner.

The basic process is to: cover one’s entire head of hair with the cap, pull selected hair through the cap, mix the powder and liquid coloring agents via the paddle, apply the mixture to the selected hair, cover the mess with the bag, process hair for time determined by the “strand test” (a recommended step whereby one only colors a few strands of hair to determine how long to color all of your hair but nobody ever really does the strand test because nobody has the attention span to go through all of this for only a couple strands of hair), rinse selected hair, remove cap and rinse all hair, apply the conditioner, rinse and then apply the toner… style as usual.

Sounds simple, eh? OK, yeah, but it gets worse. We’ll start with the coloring cap which is a plastic bonnet dotted with suggested hair hole marks (not actual holes). After putting the bonnet on your head, you have to use the hooks (plastic or metal) to puncture the hole marks (without puncturing your head…ha ha) and grab chunks of hair from underneath the cap, and pull the hair through the holes. I won’t even get into how difficult it is to do this to the back of one’s head or how frustrated you’ll get when you poke through one hole and accidentally pull hair from a previous hole thus requiring a re-doo on that hole…

So after hours of this, you finally have a head of segregated hair poufs ready for chemical processing. You then empty the powder into the tub and attempt to mix in the other two chemicals without fluffing the powder all over the counter and also into your mucous membranes. Good luck with that.

Applying the chemicals is relatively easy until you accidentally get them on skin and find out why the gloves are so prominently displayed. Don’t worry, the skin grows back in a few days.

Then you cover the mess with the head-sized bag in order to increase the temperature of the hair to better process the lightening. Next you must wait anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes before you can wash it all out thus incurring the commentary and ridicule of your family because you really do look completely stupid for 60 to 90 minutes.

When your time is up, you get to rinse the selected hair, remove the cap, and add the final finishing chemicals. Hopefully this goes according to plan and you don’t find out that you left the chemicals on too long and now have gooey gobs of melted hair, or have punctured larger holes than intended and leaked the chemicals to your scalp where they spread out and lightened too much hair to almost transparency giving the appearance of bald spots all over your head… or didn’t leave the chemicals on long enough to get past the orange stage of coloring…Not that I would know.

Yes, I’ve had my encounters with home coloring and these days I keep to the salons when I have the color urge. Hmm… how long has it been since my last appointment? Where is that phone number….ah, here it is… Yes, hello, do you have any appointments available for a color weave (they call it “weave”) next Saturday? Afternoon? Yes, yes that sounds good…and maybe a trim too… I’m getting too scraggily…