Blonde Ambition

So why is it that females never seem to be content with the way their hair looks? If it is straight, they want it curly, if it is curly, they want is straight. Blondes wish to be brunettes and brunettes wish to be blondes etc. As men, we are just happy if we have hair at all and for the most part are content leave it at that.

A few weeks ago on a Saturday night while Valerie was working. I was with the kids over at my dad's house with a few of my sisters when they started in with the hair complaints. Before I knew it, one of them was off to the store for boxes of hair color and the kitchen had become a makeshift beauty salon.

Sarah, caught up in the excitement asked me if she could get her hair colored too. Apparently she had grow tired of her youthful good looks, natural blonde with natural highlights and wanted to have her hair colored brown. I have learned many things in my fifteen years of marriage and immediately recognized Sarah's question as a trap and potential death-sentence for me. No way I was going to approve that move on my own.

She shot a few text messages back and forth with her mother and somehow managed to secure permission to go brown. Sarah shares many of the same facial features with Kate, from the show "Lost" (Evangeline Lilly) and I believe thought that the hair to match would finish the look.

I tried to warn her that once you start down the road to coloring your hair, it was very difficult to get it back to where you started if you don't like the results but by know she had been swept off into the noxious fumes of the kitchen hair salon and before I knew it emerged as a brunette. It was VERY different.

Valerie let out a bit of a gasp when she finally arrived home from work late that night but Sarah seemed to like it and that was okay. Of course, 12-year-olds are 12-year-olds and by the end of that week, what she had liked just fine on Monday had now become the worse thing to happen on the planet since... well, ever.

Again, out comes the Saturday-dad's house- beauty salon and this time Valerie is there and they have bought some sort of chemical that supposedly un-does any hair coloring that is in your hair. The fumes from this stuff are strong enough to drive the men from the kitchen and birds from the trees in yard. The result... Sarah had gone from brown to redhead. Well, that did something I guess. Again though, in Sarah's eyes no-bueno and in fact, much worse.

She again though lived with that horror a week and that brought us again to my dad's house this past Saturday evening as all the usual suspects were gathered around the table.

My sister Karen wanted to have blonde highlights put in her hair and for this had bought some odd little hat, kind of like a soft collander that she wore while one of my other sisters Pam used a tiny crochet-hook looking thing to pull locks of hair through the holes in the hat. The effect with the hat is that you look like a Barbie doll with a bad haircut but I guess the hat is kind of like the hair-lottery. If you are a lucky enough hair to get pulled through the hat you get dyed another color. In the end, you pull the hat off and all the hair mingle together once and the "winners" of the color lottery are the highlights.

Karen's winners though were disappointed to learn that for some reason the color they were given was not strong enough and they still looked exactly like their non-winning brethren. This was also a disappointment to Sarah who was hoping to use the same blonding agent to go more blonde from her current red state. No dice with this weak stuff.

They decided to give this one more go and also decided to compound their earlier mistakes by sending me to the store to find something that might work. They asked me to get something that would be strong enough to turn dark hair blonde. Now sending me to the store to buy hair color would be a little like me sending Valerie to the store to buy sparkplugs. She would surely return with sparkplugs but beyond that, no guarantees.

When I got the store, there was a whole aisle of color from which I could choose but one immediately caught my eye as being strong enough to get the job done.

To be honest, I first just fell in love with the ironic product name. "Creme of Nature" when the illustration on the box is about as far from natural as you could get. I know that is a poor reason to select the product but I was already sold by now.

Still, I thought that if it did what box showed, I figured it could turn anything blonde. It was on sale too so I grabbed two boxes. Of course, there was a member of the church in line right behind me at the store while I was buying this stuff (figures) but I was careful to distract her and keep the product from view while I was rung up. I can't imagine what she might have thought I was up to had she seen what I was buying.

There were some protests of my selection when I got back to the "salon" but after some reassurance they were off to color the world again. I figured if this wouldn't turn Sarah's hair blonde, nothing would. Sure enough, the stuff did a great job for those seeking highlights but as for Sarah... here hair is now yellow. Like cartoon yellow.

That brings us to today. Valerie and Sarah have finally conceded that they have done enough and have brought this to the attention of the professionals. Today, as I type this they are visiting a Gene Juarez salon and I am once again reminded why I am glad to be a man.