Glamour Girl Secrets: Orange is the New Black

By Donna Drejza

DonnaDrejza.com

Do you remember what color your hair is? I was born with jet black hair. (They just had B&W photography.) Then, like all teenage girls, I put a product called  “Sun-In” on my hair. This turns hair orange. This is one of those functional obsolescence inventions which spawns a lifetime of hair coloring.

Besides black and orange, my hair has been beige, brown and red. And once a color that can only be described as Neapolitan. The hair dresser asked if I wanted my hair to have glossy streaks that would be easy to maintain. Yes I did!   I had envisioned multi-faceted highlights like Jennifer Aniston. The outcome was very different. Oh, it was multifaceted, but it was not streaks, but more like horizontal bands consisting of a 4 inch band of chocolate brown at the roots, then 4 inches of strawberry blonde, then 4 inches of vanilla.

I think the colorist realized she had made an error on my hair, when she hid in the colorist room crying. She knew this would take at least 4 years to grow out. A poor unwitting colorist on his way to lunch was assigned to my “case.” He put corrective coloring on my head and continued out to lunch, leaving me with Rosario the shampoo girl.  No timer was set and after a while, I noticed the salon “Muzak” tape had played a second time.  The result: A color so black, it was not blue like in a cartoon of Snow White —it was so black it was green! Later, when the experts were called in, they shook their heads and advised lightening it with peroxide and Cascade. Yes, I know that hair color is a tricky operation. As I sit at salons, I watch my blonde sisters get these complex operations that involve a million pieces of foil jutting from their heads like Jiffy-Pop Martians.

Now, parts of my hair have turned white. Not salt and pepper, just salt. But I feel sorry for my follicles. How are they expected to produce packets of black? It’s not like I eat licorice everyday. I can’t blame them. It’s like my pigment cells threw their arms up and quit. 

Have you noticed that men never write songs or poems about women with white or gray hair? So, every 3 weeks I have to deal with these roots.  Sometimes the white just comes out of nowhere. When this happens, I rely on a handy new invention: “My Secret Correctives.” It’s a tiny can of spray paint for roots. It is not without its drawbacks. One must avoid getting caught in a rain storm or diving into the community pool, which would leave a telltale black wake.

Yes, sometimes I go to the salon. But this solution takes up 2 hours and nearly $200 of my fun money. I have found ways around this.  Often, I attempt this procedure my self. The problem is I can’t see what is going on at the back of my head, plus I have short arms. This, like most of my undertakings, means I need an accomplice. 

Well, I live alone and most of my friends and neighbors have real jobs during the day. Or they pretend to. This leaves one person in the whole world who is always there for me —and  who is always around in the afternoons. The Fed-Ex man.

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