A good hair day?

Well, I finally did it! Trying to organise myself to get a hairdressing appointment sorted for a Saturday is not working and the box of hair colour was winking at me from the bathroom shelf.

I carefully read the instructions and decided that I was well capable of following them. I had watched what the hair dresser did on numerous occasions, and it was not beyond me! That said – she made it look a lot easier than it was! The front of the head was do-able, but the back of the head was plain guess-work. I was trying to cover the roots first, leave the colour to fix for a while, and then “refresh” the rest of the hair – see, I even know the right jargon!

Contrary to what most pupils think – teachers do not have eyes in the back of their heads – they would have been most useful! In the end I looked like the woman in the diagrams on the instruction sheet. I also felt like I usually feel in the hairdresser – things were going well.

I ruined a perfectly good jumper by not following the instruction of putting a towel over the shoulders. It said “non-drip cream”, but it did drip!

The end result is a head of rich auburn hair with no grey roots! It is much darker than I anticipated, much darker than it has been for years. My once natural shade was very dark brown, almost black with a kind of blue/blackness to it. This is kind of that dark but with a red hint to it. I keep catching glimpses of me in mirrors and doing a double take.

I am however rather impressed – that it is not orange, that the box did what it said it would do, that I have saved a LOT of money, that I have done something I consider quite courageous and that I can live with it for the next three months!.

My husband, Joe, gave me the once over and decided that, yes, it was very dark, perhaps a shade darker on the top than at the bottom – but like it is supposed to be like that, and not an unintentional effect. He also looked at his own hair greying at the temples and asked if I had used all the colour in the hair kit. Seeing as I haven’t made a mess of my own head, he thinks he might entrust his own into my enthusiastic but unskilled hands!

Incidentally my mother always used to cut my dad’s hair. In the early days of our marriage, I offered to cut Joe’s hair – thinking that it was what wives did to their husbands. Joe looked horrified! He made it quite clear that the day I take a pair of scissors to his head is the day we divorce.

Incidentally, he also has bushy eyebrows. His sister took me to task one day for not “tidying them up”. She is the kind of woman that would tie him to a chair, firmly tell him not to be a baby and sit still while she snipped away! I am not made of such stern stuff!