Boldly Going Where I Haven't Gone Before

There is something I do that I dislike more than anything else. I spend a FORTUNE on my hair. I don't do it because I want to, more often than not, I feel I need to. This is because I have very stubborn gray hair. Hair that takes an hour to process in order to get 3 weeks of coverage out of it (if I'm lucky.)

Because of this, I've pretty much stuck with blond. I have a darker base and blond highlights. When my gray grows in, the blond hides it for awhile. The damage that years of processing have caused are great. My hair is not very healthy looking though I can smooth a lot of that over with products. Beneath that product, my hair is frazzy: fragile and frizzy.

I am reluctant to tell you the cost of this maintenance. It's frivolous spending at it's best and all because I think I'm too young to be so gray. Who tells us this? Why do we feel so compelled to look so youthful? What in the world is wrong with looking my age? I know that with my back problems, I feel older than 51. What's wrong with looking 51?

There is another aspect to the finances of hair color that annoy me. While I'm sitting in the stylist's chair, I'm acutely aware that he or she is making twice the amount of money that I do. No offense to any stylists out there, but do you really need to charge what you do? During these rough economic times, salons have not dropped their fees at all. Why should they? "They" have us feeling that if we don't keep this up, we'll be old and haggard looking. When I went to the salon yesterday to complete step 2 of my boldly going places project, there was not a single empty chair in this hip establishment. Not one. The only people getting just a haircut were me and the men. Everyone else had some sort of color concoction on their heads.

So, there you have the why of it. The how of it all has been a long time coming. For the past two years, I've let my hair grow. It was super short (think Sharon Stone short) and very blond. In two years, it got just past my chin. This mop was curly enough that I could diffuse it and hide the gray that is at the root. This allowed me to ignore my color issues for 6 weeks instead of the 3 I was used to. Since December though, I've been thinking it's time. Time to stop this. That was about the time I read Oprah's October magazine issue about gray. Jamie Lee Curtis was also making the talk show rounds and sporting her short gray hair. These two things were liberating events for me. I had my last run in with a colorist in March and had now acquired close to 2 inches of gray growth at the top. Yesterday, I let Tiffany have at it. It's all gone. Hair. Blond. Gone. The only things that aren't gone are my self esteem and the money in my bank account.