I was sitting on campus with a friend, my laptop open on a blank Google Doc page on my lap when a girl skated by. She was wearing a lavender hoodie and black jeans, decorated with chains and a black surgical mask over her nose and mouth. Her hair was lavender with white tips. I noticed my friend was looking at her skate by, too, just as mesmerized as I was.
“Look at her hair,” She said.
“That’s the main character,” I joked. “And we’re all side characters.”
My friend said, “At least your hair is bright. You could be the comic relief or something.”
Subconsciously, I reached up to brush my hair over one shoulder. “It used to be brighter.” I said. “This is technically it’s natural color, but it’s been through so much over the years that it just keeps getting darker.”
I love the term “strawberry blond” (possibly in part due to the mitski song “Strawberry Blond”) but it always makes me smile when people describe me as such. My hair used to be on the lighter side, if you can believe that. People used to stop me in the street to comment on my hair. Mostly to ask if it was natural, which always confused me because I was like, 12 years old at the time and had never even thought about changing my hair color. Then freshman year, I met a ginger waitress at a restaurant in Austin who had the tips of her orange hair bleached. Her hair was in a thick, low ponytail that day so I thought it resembled a fox tail. The nice waitress let me snap a picture of her hair on my phone, so that when I went to the salon the next day I could show it to the hair stylist and ask for exactly that. As the lady was shampooing my hair, I remember her saying, “You know, people pay to have your hair color”. I thanked her, feeling awkward that she would say that about 30 seconds before I dyed my natural hair. I said, “Yeah. I just wanted to try something new”.
After my salon trip, my hair didn’t look much like the waitress’s, but I loved it nonetheless. The stylist had gone for more of an ombre look, with the orange at the top of my head fading to platinum-blond tips. (Think Black Widow in Endgame, but I did it first. She copied me.) When I went back to Houston and saw my friends after that, they loved it, too. They said it looked like fire and did a mini-photoshoot at a park where I got to show off my hair. It was awesome. I honestly felt like such a badass. It’s funny how such a seemingly miniscule change in your appearance can raise your confidence levels through the roof. Like how people love the character customization aspect of certain video games, I loved customizing myself to my liking.
I continued to bleach the tips of my hair for the following few years, and quickly learned to do it myself with bottle dye in my bathroom at home. For those years, when people would ask if my hair was natural, I would say “This part is” while putting my hand on the top of my head, “But this is bleached” and hold up the tips for them.
Then junior year came, and around that time is when I started getting into k-pop. One of the defining traits of K-pop idols is their ever-changing, brightly-colored, dyed hair. Of course, this wasn’t the first time I had been exposed to this. Before that, I met a girl with a bright blue pixie-cut and striking blue eyes that matched her hair color. The one, small glimpse of her that I got has never left my mind. So maybe that’s where it all started, but it was definitely the K-pop idols that got me really thinking about it again. Fans will pick their favorites of the myriad of colors that an idol’s hair has been, saying things like “Bring back blue Yeonjun!” or “Mint Yoongi supremacy!” (that second one is a pun because the idol’s full name is Min Yoongi, and his hair at one point was mint-green).
I wished I, too, could change my hair to any exotic color on a whim and see what suited me best. I would’ve stood out, I would’ve been able to showcase my uniqueness for everyone to see, but alas, my cheer squad had a “no unnatural hair colors” rule, so I had to wait until the season was over to start my colorful new life. During that time, I remember feeling bored with how I looked. I was so jealous of the k-pop idols I saw on my screen, who went through like, three hair colors a month. And I was sitting here stuck with my lame, ginger-ish blond-ish red-ish hair.
Finally, I rounded out my cheerleading career in the winter of my senior year, and I could start doing whatever I wanted with my hair. First, I decided to do clown-nose red. But not my whole head, just prominent streaks. I told myself I would never dye my roots any color other than my natural color because then the orange would grow back in and it would look bad. Like a little split of orange on the top of a head of different colored hair. This, combined with the blond tips I already had, has been my favorite look so far. It really looked like fire, now. Then came quarantine, which was interesting because teens everywhere started to get bored and dye their hair. Now, what seems like everyone on TikTok has posted a video showing off their new, bright, hair. And it always looks great. I love that everyone is doing this now, because to me, it seems so futuristic. I wondered if they’re all dyeing their hair because they got bored with themselves, too. If they also looked in the mirror and said, “this is the same person I’ve been staring at my whole life.” Some people were saying it was because changing their hair color gave them a sense of control in their lives in a moment where they felt like they were losing control of it. Other trends included girls cutting their own bangs (one that I never really understood because it only ended up looking good like, 50% of the time), getting piercings, slitting their eyebrows, etc, etc.
Anyway, I changed my hair color again my first semester of college. This was a big one, because I had never dyed my whole head before, but on my roommates’ requests, we bought purple dye and dyed my entire head purple. My roommates all put gloves on and soaked my hair in the dye while I sat in the bathtub. Then we washed my hair, dried it, and it was dark. Like, really dark. I had expected a nice, lavender color but instead it was almost black. I was not a fan. My hair wasn’t light anymore, and there was no telling if it would ever be as light as it once was ever again. I could kiss “strawberry blond” goodbye.
“It’s… really dark” I remember saying.
My roommates said to that, “I think it looks great. Honestly, I like it better than your light hair,” but I was pretty sure that they were only saying that because they were the ones who had suggested it. It was the biggest change in my physical appearance that I had ever made, and I hated it. I immediately started thinking about ways I could get it back to its natural color. For my whole life, I considered being a mostly-red-head part of my identity, and I had so recklessly erased that. I didn’t want to tell my mom because I knew she would hate it. Even when I just dyed parts of my hair, she would alway say afterward, “It’s cute, but I like your natural hair better.” I couldn’t imagine how she would react to such a big change as this one.
My mom found out when my roommate sent a picture to her mom, and her mom told my mom. And it wasn’t that she reacted poorly, per se, just that she did that subtle, motherly, condemnation that I’m sure we are all familiar with. Honestly, I think the fact that my mom didn’t seem to outright despise it was one of the reasons I didn’t end up despising it. After I showered a few more times and the color got less black and more purple (think Raven from the Teen Titans cartoon), or maybe it was just the fact that I slept on it, but a few days later I felt much better about my new hair. That regret I felt passed so quickly that I felt stupid for ever feeling it. I still felt a bit like I had lost my “ginger” identity, but it was okay now, because I gained a new “purple-hair-girl” identity, which I found even better. I loved my purple hair. I really felt like a K-pop idol. I kept thinking that if I had a fanbase, this would be their favorite look: “Grape Megan superiority!”, they’d say.
After the purple faded and it went through this strange orange-purple phase, I borrowed some of my roommate’s pink dye and put in light pink streaks in my hair. Then that quickly faded and I was back to the bleak orange-brown that I was trying so hard to avoid. I felt boring again.
It’s not that I want to be the “main character” or anything like the Lavender Skateboarder, the Blue Pixie, or the Foxtail Waitress probably was. I don’t care about grabbing people’s attention like they did, either. I just feel like if I can look more interesting, I should. I want to be like the girl I saw skateboarding, not because I want other’s attention, but because I want to look so uniquely me. I don’t want to look like anyone else. I want to express myself. It’s more important to me that people are impressed with how I express my personality than that they find me attractive. So it’s a strange mix of individuality, while also being that I wanted to emulate the Lavender Skateboarder, the Blue Pixie, the Foxtail Waitress, Raven from Teen Titans, or k-pop idols because I found them attractive. The day before my roommate dyed her hair from pink back to its natural color, she told me, “I think I’m gonna get highlights again. Because when I got highlights, I remember everyone complimenting me on how good it looked. Now, when people see I have pink hair, they just say, like, ‘Oh. It’s pink. How fun’, or ‘interesting’, or whatever”. She preferred the former; I preferred the latter. Because I care more about looking what I want me to look like than what others want me to look like. Truly, I care more about looking “interesting” than looking “good”. It’s difficult to describe without sounding pretentious, and I’ve got nothing but love for the amazing women who prefer to keep their hair natural or who enjoy validation from outside sources about their physical appearance, but everyone’s different. It’s so interesting to me to see how people like to present themselves and why. I like hearing about the choices and reasonings that go into how people express their individuality through their style. And so, this is mine.
