A couple of weeks into lockdown, I did a bad thing.
I highlighted my own hair.
Even as I opened the box I could hear my colorist yelling at me from all the way across the city, but I couldn’t help it: I’d already been badly in need of a touch-up when the world shut down, and whatever, I was bored, and still in the moment of quarantine when it felt like an opportunity to try new things (puzzles! bread! …remember when we still had energy?!). And highlighting my own hair sounded kind of fun, or at the very least perhaps an opportunity to generate Content (tips and tricks! fashion roundups! …remember when we still had an iota of bandwidth left?!).
It came out pretty cute, actually! I used a Clairol Balayage kit, where you basically just paint stripes onto your hair, and sure, it was a little chunky and not super pro-looking, but it also cost $12 as opposed to…well, let’s just say much, much more.
Had I left it there, I might have been fine. But then my relative success inspired me to do a much worse thing than the first Bad Thing:
I decided to brag about my expert skilzz to Erin, who – in a flash of shockingly poor judgment – agreed to let me highlight her hair on our trip to Paso Robles.
It did not go well.
Oh my.
(Somewhat surprisingly, Erin is still friends with me.)
But! Because I enjoy few things more than never, ever learning my own lesson, a couple of weeks ago I decided to highlight my own hair AGAIN – this time with one of those 1950s-style pull-through caps. The end result of this was that my hair broke off in a tiny halo of fuzz around my face. So now I had roots, bits of yellow, bits of orange, and fuzz!
When I finally broke and went to see my actual colorist a couple of days ago (outside, masks, etc), her reaction (after telling me to never, ever do this again) was this:
“Wow. You…have a lot going on there.”
That’s one way to put it.
And so, my friends, we reach our conclusion.
Don’t highlight your own hair. Or your friend’s.
Just don’t do it.
