I posted this briefly yesterday, but it was too whiny, so I am trying again this morning. I know there are a lot of people who follow my blog and have hair loss, so I am going to apologize upfront about this post to all of you: I am going to complain about my bio hair  I don’t have hair loss, and I realize it must be obnoxious to hear women without hair loss complain about their perfectly good bio hair, but I am still frustrated, so I apologize for being obnoxious about this.

In fact, I think wigs have spoiled me a bit when it comes to dealing with my own hair. I always wore my hair pixie-short, until I started wearing long wigs; then I realized oh wow, I can look really good in long hair! So, I started growing mine out. I’ve spent several years doing it, too, and all along I’ve been telling myself that when it gets to some certain, magical, future length – it will start to look as awesome as, say, Angelica, or even something more tame like Star Quality. The reason it didn’t look amazing yet was simply that it hadn’t gotten long enough.

Except that, it really is a length now where if it was going to look amazing, it would by now, and it doesn’t. It’s not horrible, but it is baby fine, and it’s limp. It’s hair that would definitely look better if it were shorter than it currently is. So, okay. I have fine, limp hair, that would look much better short but I am not yet willing to cut all this length I’ve worked so hard to get (if not cutting one’s hair for five years can be considered hard work). So I don’t like that my shoulder-length hair looks flat instead of full and has no bounce, but I can accept it for now to keep some length and have something different for awhile.

But, my hair is also very dark, and I know from my wig wearing that I look better with lighter hair – so surely that’s something chemicals can correct, yes? So, Tuesday I went to a hair appointment that I’d been looking forward to for a week, because I was going to say to hell with keeping my hair natural and color it to death. I found loads of beautiful photos of caramel-and-blonde highlighted brunettes, showed them to my stylist, and we set to work. Allow me here to show you the photo that best represents what I was hoping for – color only, obviously:

And by the way, yes, that does look like a rather complex collection of colors on one head, but this stylist is one I’ve known for at least ten years, and although I have not colored my hair in the past five, when I was coloring my hair all the time she is who I used. She was always very skilled with color and my hair came out at least this amazing every time, if not more so. She put some fantastic colors on my hair over the years. Moving on.

It took about 45 minutes just to get all the dye slathered on, and about 30 minutes later we washed it out. I am blind as a bat without my glasses, and of course I take my glasses off while my hair is being cut and colored, so I didn’t get the big reveal until everything was over two hours after sitting down in her chair. Allow me to show you first what my hair looked like before the cut and color:

And now, the after:

Yeah, you’re seeing that correctly. It looks exactly the same.

Since my hair was virgin hair (no dye or other chemicals), my stylist believed she could treat it like hair that had never been colored before, and go easy on, I dunno, whatever it is colorists go easy on when dying virgin hair. And it did not take at all. So, she cut and styled it while I sat there blindly thinking everything was going according to plan, and it was a HUGE disappointment when I took my first look and saw not only the same color but what appeared to be the same cut as well.

I actually don’t think the cut is too far off, really; the model is probably 21 years old at most, with much fuller hair, so something may have just gotten lost in translation to my baby-fine mop and it didn’t do anything to give it a boost. And hair dye often changes the texture of fine hair and makes it more coarse, so it has added body, and I guess since the dye didn’t take I didn’t get any benefit from that either. So this was seriously disappointing all around. But, I’m going back Friday so we can try again, so this will all be corrected soon.

Anyway – the point of all this? Is that I had NO IDEA how surreal it would be to sit in a salon chair for two hours with no inkling of what’s going on only to finally see the results and be starting back at THE EXACT SAME PERSON I was before you sat down. It was so bizarre, I actually looked around for the hidden cameras. Where did all that hair dye go? What was all that snipping and blowdrying about? Am I dreaming? Have I gone insane? Granted, it would have been much worse to see the big reveal and have it be fried, or bright orange, or cut up over my ears on one side, but that is at least a story we’ve all heard before, and have probably experienced ourselves once or twice. This? Was just too freaky for words. And I couldn’t help but over-analyze, just a bit, why it was so disappointing to look into a mirror and just see me. Sheesh, what a downer! I mean, it was only because I was so built up to see something different, but still. I had to check in with my self-esteem for a minute to be sure I wasn’t suddenly spiraling into self-hate. But no, I just wanted pretty highlights, and I didn’t get them; I think my self-esteem is still OK.

Anyway, I’m looking forward now to Friday, when I get to do this whole process over again and, hopefully, come out the other side with a different look. Shouldn’t be a problem. We’ll see how it goes.