Essay.(hair care)

True Colors

Changing your hair color can recapture the past *or open up a future of possibility. Three writers reflect on how the decision to dye has colored their world.

Winning Streaks by Mary Gaitskill

Winning Streaks

By Mary Gaitskill

6[currency]6W hen I was young, and my hair was organically better than it is now, I didn [macron]t like it. I was pretty typical that way *it seems that most young women, pretty, plain, or beautiful, are unhappy with their appearances, and if their hair happens to be brown, they are often especially unhappy with it. My hair was brown, and on top of that, I thought it was too thin. I spent years pounding on it with a hair dryer, hiding it under scarves and hats, dying it blonde, red, black, and blue, ratting it and despising it. On the rare occasion when I could afford to see an actual hairdresser, and he remarked, [degrees]You really have a lot of hair, [+ or -] I ignored him.

And then something happened. One day, I forgot to hate my hair. I turned 31 and remembered that I had pretty brown hair. When I grew out my roots and discovered that my formerly chestnut hair had darkened to a near-black streaked prematurely with white, I was shocked. At 31, this did not make me happy *except that I was intrigued to notice that whatever they signified, the silver streaks were actually beautiful. It helped that my face was still unusually youthful. It also helped that my white hair lent itself to playing with color in an especially fun way; it was still the [macron]80s, and instead of bleaching my hair to dye it blue, I could now apply the color directly, which turned my hair jet-black streaked with electric blue. Perhaps because I was no longer bleaching or ratting it, I finally discovered that those hairdressers had been telling the truth; in fact, I did have thick hair. I ...