How to Change (Really Change) Your Hair Coloring

California girl with her daisies.

Like my mother before me, I've not really known my true hair coloring for the last few decades.  I was born a blond in southern California.  I graduated from high school a brunette, and in those seventeen years never once changed my hair color, well maybe just a streak of blonde.  A dear dear mentor, Mabel Hotz a golfer from Tulsa, once suggested, "Letty, don't ever change your hair color, stay golden.  I think one of the greatest test in life is stay true to yourself."

I just heard the words "stay golden" and that was before another person in Tulsa, S.E. Hinton made the phrase "stay golden Pony Boy" popular.  Golden indeed, thanks to Lady Clairol and many trips to the "beauty shop" to correct a few mistakes along the way I became a blond of many shades.  So began my sojourn into a rainbow of hair colorings.  I can't report that they were all pretty.  One of my students in Greensburg, KS, Gary, who loved to roll his wheel chair into the library once declared, "Ms. Rains, you are the only teacher I've ever known with orange hair."  Orange, now that sent me back to the bottle!

A date was even cancelled when I lived in Greensburg, because Lady Clairol turned my hair green.  It took a panicked trip to a beauty shop in Pratt to fix that problem.  Still I never fully succeeded in that golden color. After that experience I began the trial of letting my hair color grow out naturally.  Those were the really short hair times in school pictures.  The brown didn't last long, boring as they say.

After years of home experiences I decided that a hair salon might be a smart but costly move, after all living on a teacher's salary has it's limits, but then pride has it's price!  Frosting  hair was popular for years (decades) and I loved it.   One day,  I discovered that my roots were a different color, actually no color, rather "translucent" as my friend Jeannette calls it.  In a bold decision in this new century I decided it was time for me to color my own hair. This time L'Oreal would be the perfect "color the gray" product.  I must say L'Oreal treated me kindly.

But the best intentions sometimes create dramatic effects.  Here are the steps to creating a dramatic hair color change:
* use a new or different product guaranteed to cover the gray.
*definitely look at  the directions
*then pick a short easy project to complete while the hair is absorbing the new color--
  This is the KEY, don't learn how to send photos to be developed at Walgreens while color is on the hair.
*use a timer (too, late for this piece of information)
*suddenly look up and scream and scurry to the bathroom.
*shampoo and scrub with all the strength that adrenaline will allow
*shower and shampoo again just in case
*blow dry while bent over so as not to see the color until it's dry.
*then be ready to gasp or laugh out loud.

There will be no pictures posted of this color.  Hopefully, a brief description can make the picture clear:  What once was quite blond is now slightly gray green or perhaps it is dirty ash.  What was once brown is now dark gray.  I must have made a mistake somewhere along the line.

Anybody else ever make a hair coloring mistake?