It’s amazing all the memories that came flooding back while coloring my hair this evening. I have been coloring my hair since I was about 12. It all started with way too much Sun-In. I loved the bleached out look but my mom didn’t. I was given a color close to what it should have been and told to fix it.
Fast forward to when I discovered I liked red highlights. Mountain Home AFB, Idaho I was using my regular favorite shade of brown and I got distracted talking on the CB radio (okay, stop laughing, I was actually geeking on the sideband technology, so give me a break) and the color stayed on a bit too long. Not long enough to make it brassy, but just long enough to bring out the red highlights – I was hooked. I always had the temperament of a redhead. So my new favorite color became “Tawny Auburn” – that one stayed with me for quite a while. A sidenote here, I started graying very prematurely, so coloring my hair was a way of life.
So after moving half way around the world, up to the frozen north and down to the deep south, I starting trying on the strawberry side of blonde, after the Sun-In experience I don’t think I ever tried blonde again. I still can see the picture of me with Strawberry Blonde hair, standing in front of our Yard of the Month sign at Gunter AFB, Montgomery, Alabama. A sidenote here, I’ve lived so long here in Alabama some people would try to tell me I’m from here, sorry folks, them there’s fightin words.
After I got the Strawberry Blonde phase out of my system, I went back to the more subtle side of red or so I thought. I treated myself to a Glamour Shots session a few years back. I remember hearing a remark my ex made about how I changed my hair color to red. One more reason he’s my ex, it had been “red” all those years, just different shades of it.
Other memories that rolled out was one of my mom’s last comments about my hair, she had asked me when it turned so dark. I have to sidenote this, my mom was terminally ill with cancer, at this point it was already in her brain, so I sort of brushed off the comment to the illness. I stopped in my tracks when I looked at a very old picture of me, it was a black & white picture that had been colorized (eat your heart out Ted Turner) – my hair color was blonde in the picture. It reminded me of Megan’s hair when she was little, it was so blonde but has darked with age too.
The thoughts of hair color also reminded me of my mom’s, her hair was black, jet black, but she used to frost it. I always thought it looked so cool, it was probably how she hid all the gray hair I gave her. My last memory of my mom also has to do with her hair. It was my last time with her, we were at the funeral home, I remember stroking her snow white hair…
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