do people treat me differently as a blonde?

This, my friends, is the million dollar question, the question that drives this project, the question that is on everybody's lips when I tell them about being an Undercover Blonde.

The answer is an emphatic yes:

Men look at me more.
My friends tell me I look thinner.
My brother, for the first time in my life, refers to me as pretty.

Yes, people treat me differently as a blonde. Friends, family, strangers, but most importantly: me.

I woke up this morning with the startling realization that no matter what I've always said about beauty being within, about beautiful being more than just what they tell us on TV, no matter how I've shunned traditional concepts of beauty, and the whole blonde haired + blue eyes = beautiful thing, somewhere along the line, Sarah Lawrence education and gender studies aside, I completely bought in to all of it.

As a blonde, I feel beautiful, more beautiful than I ever did as a brunette.

I feel powerful, I feel bold, I feel sexy, I feel as though I am part of a long tradition of symbolism, representing desire, sex appeal, power, and danger.

I know that for this project, I will need to dye my hair dark again, darker even than it ever was before. But the problem is this:

I don't think I'm going to want to go back.