I wanted to leave my natural hair color of black, which has decidedly silver roots with advancing age, and bleach my hair completely out to white, silver, whatever you want to call it. Sounds like a good, albeit daunting task but been there done that was not scared in the least. I went to Sally’s Beauty supply and bought 3 packets of bleach and 40-volume peroxide and came home to start my transformation which started with me chopping off several inches of my hair.
First surprise, it didn’t bleach all the way up even after 2 hours, second surprise, it was a nice peach color with basically yellow roots. So I got my scissors back out and cut off all the peachy apricot ends, more hair on the sink and was left with light yellow hair which is not great if you have olive complexion like I have! Back to the beauty supply, more bleach, more disastrous results, more bleach, toner, peroxide in shampoo until I had a nice light Easter egg color of hair so I decided to just shave it all off with the hair clippers I had used on my son for many years. Now the funny thing was that my children had been gone all week to Disney in Orlando so they didn’t know this had been going on, I declined their face time calls because I had a bad cold and told them I wasn’t wearing any makeup and looked horrible, explanation accepted! When they came in I was wearing a navy blue sock hat and after my son had jerked it off my head to see what the heck I had done to myself there were gasps of horror and rolling on the floor with laughter. I told them, “Hey it’s only hair and hair grows.” That was a mistake that time took care of and we have laughed about.
What I didn’t tell you when I first told you that story was this, I have never told it publicly before because I was too ashamed! I can’t stand a fraud but I realized that I was a huge fraud, so as Paul Harvey would have said, here is the rest of the story:
I was not a fraud on purpose but the result was the same. I went to the grocery store the next day after shaving my head to buy groceries and when I was putting them into the back of my van and having a little struggle with something, a lady who was many years my senior came rushing to help me! She had tears of compassion in her eyes as she helped me lift my things into place. I wondered why she would do that when suddenly I had a light bulb moment, it was then I wanted to die of shame and embarrassment at fooling this sweet woman who walked away feeling as if she had done a really good deed for a “cancer patient”. I knew there an then that I would never do that again!
OK, that’s off my chest now! That was a mistake that wouldn’t send me to hell, but I felt like it and worse than that I looked like it!