Self series pt. 2; Headpaint.

In my adolescent glory days of wannabe scenester-wank-fuckerdom, I used to dye my hair a different colour every few weeks. I completely disregarded years of careful blonde foiling at my ridiculously expensive hair salon one night and dyed the whole thing black because my boyfriend wanted me to. In retrospect, it wasn't a good look, but such is that time in everyone's lives I suppose. Unfortunately I chose this ill-fated moment to have my ten-year passport photo taken. Good move.

After the black I left it alone long enough for that to fade to a perfectly acceptable shade of brown, but after aforementioned boyfriend dumped me I went on what I now understand to have been a misguided hair-dyeing binge in an attempt to regain control over my life. I started by putting a few orangey-blonde streaks in my hair which probably didn't look too bad compared to what I did next, which was to bleach my whole hair about five times in one week so it went from being practically black to completely blonde. Well, almost completely. I'm pretty sure I gave myself actual bleach-poisoning in the process.

I realised how frighteningly generic I looked like this and made the inexplicable choice of dyeing the whole thing pink. I looked like some awful travesty of a 90s pop star. So that didn't last long either and I put it back to brown for quite a while after that.

For the next few years I basically left it alone. The brown faded and I started dyeing it somewhere pretty close to my natural colour, which is a sort of mousey honey-blonde-brown sort of thing. Just after I turned 21 I dyed it red and that's what it's been ever since.

As a result of all this my hair is now totally fucked. It won't grow. It won't take colour. The back fades so much faster than the front that a week after colouring it it looks like I've dipped it in peroxide. I know I should just cut it all off and start over, but honestly I just can't bring myself to give up on four years worth of wishful thinking.

Anyway I just discovered this stuff:

And three weeks after using this shit it's still the same colour all over. I've actually discovered that I miss my weekly ritual of ammonia poisoning and ruining the bathroom. Colouring my hair has become such an integral part of my life, which is weird when you think about the fact that the whole point of it is to change something about yourself from its natural state to an artificial substitute. These days we can choose pretty much everything about how we look. We can have piercings and tattoos, fake tans, fake teeth, fake nails, all manner of plastic surgery, hair extensions, high-heeled shoes, coloured contact lenses; there isn't an area of personal appearance that we can't alter in some way now.

I like this. While I would never personally have most of the things on that list, I think it's nice that people now have the choice to make their outside selves match more closely to their inside ones. In my mind I'm a redhead with a nose ring. In actuality, I'm a blonde with only two naturally occurring holes in my nose, but I get to choose to change this if I want to, and I do.

I think about how unlike themselves my friends with tattoos or coloured hair or whatever would be in their "natural" states, and it leaves me to conclude that the most natural state for any person is the one that most closely matches the way they see themselves. We're lucky now that we get to chase this possibility, and while I doubt anybody ever entirely achieves it, chasing down our real selves is what we spend most of our lives doing anyway, so we might as well look good doing it.