doll hair

Did you ever try to style your Barbie's hair when you were little? Do you remember what a fruitless, pointless pursuit it was? No matter how much twisting or curling you did, it never stayed where it was supposed to. Sure, Pretty Make-Over Barbie may have come with a plastic comb and brush and brightly colored ribbons and elastics, all included in the plastic packaging so you could "do Barbie's hair at home!" But did you ever try to actually run those items through her hair? They didn't work. They didn't do anything but get stuck and snarled in her dry, brittle, totally un-style-able doll hair. The package may have claimed to include "all you need to make Barbie look like she just walked out of the salon" but did any of that stuff ever work? No. Because Barbie had doll hair.

And that is what my hair feels like now: Limp, useless, blonde doll hair. After all of the bleaching, processing, heat styling, darkening, and bleaching again, my hair has lost almost all of its natural elasticity. The previously strong, healthy strands are now little pathetic wisps showing what the trained eye would identify as visible signs of breakage (to everyone else, it just looks kinda frizzy.)

Did I know this would happen? Was I warned? Yes, of course I was. Jason is my hair guru. However, once upon a time I had absolutely gorgeous, naturally low maintenance hair. I was one of those people, whose hair did pretty much whatever I asked of it, whenever I wanted. Slightly uneven haircut? Well, that's hardly noticeable when your hair has so much body and natural curl! Bad hair day? Yeah, those must suck. I think I had one of those, once. Yes, I was warned that undertaking this project would "damage" may hair, that my hair would "not be the same" after so much processing. But did I really understand the true gravity of those statements? Hell no. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure," I said. "Dye it anyway!" Feeling very noble I'd add, "We all must suffer for our art."

Now my hair is like a porous sponge that throws up it's frizzy broken wisps in a tizzy at even the slightest hint of humidity. August in Boston is upon us, which means that I might as well just accept the fact that I will not be having a good hair day until October. My only recourse, I have decided, is to visit Jason once a week for a wash & blow-out, like my grandma used to. I now completely understand the concept of the old lady visit to the beauty parlor. It may be my only choice.

Make no mistake, blonding neophytes. The color transition from dark to light is no simple feat. Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears, Cameron Diaz, all those Hollywood starlets might have you thinking otherwise. But seriously, it is a bitch. Seamless transition between shades, much like instant loss of baby weight after pregnancy, is a fantasy. It only happens in Hollywood.

All of that said, I'm still, for some reason, absolutely delighted to be blonde again.