What Coloring My Hair Taught Me About Myself
Just this week, I dyed my hair back to (or at least an approximation of) my natural hair color. Ground-breaking stuff, I know. I’ll get there.
Growing up in the early two-thousands meant I had ALL KINDS of unkind terms to apply to myself and my appearance at my fingertips with the internet and tween magazines at the ready. My natural hair color (a cool-toned dark blonde/ light brunette) has been called everything from mousy to the color of dirty dishwater.
As an impressionable tween, it was made pretty clear that my natural color was at best undesirable and at worst ugly. So, like any self-respecting seventh grader, I begged my mom to take me to the beauty store and get some box dye. The success of said dye job will be left up for interpretation, but let’s just say that what was supposed to be brown turned inexplicably swamp green. Yikes.
Nearly two decades go by and at this point, I’ve had my hair red, brown, and blonde for many years. Before this current dye job, I had been bright, icy, balayaged blonde for almost eight years in total. I was getting sick of it and wanted a change.
It might sound sort of ridiculous, but I was also scared of that change. When you go blonde, everyone tells you how good it looks and that you should keep it. It is, after all, the societal standard of beauty and the most desired color (despite all the dumb blonde jokes, but we can talk about THAT another time). It felt scary to give up the thing that so many people had complimented me on and that I honestly did like on myself.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, I came across a TikTok of someone talking about how so many blondes were dying their hair “old money brunette” (the internet has a name for everything, I’ll tell ya) and that anyone who was telling these newly minted brunettes that they looked good was lying. Now, I was curious. WTF is old money brunette, and why are so many blondes going that route?
I clicked on the little blue search term and found quite a few videos of hair transformations in which blondes were dying their hair a light brown/dark blonde. A few of the videos looked remarkably like my exact natural color. And to my even greater surprise, I found myself looking at the color with envy and longing. I thought it was so pretty! Even more shocking was that the comments agreed with me. So many people remarked on how nice the color was.
What really struck me were the comments from people saying, “This is my natural hair color! I love that it’s getting upgraded to old money brunette rather than dirty dishwater blonde.” It brought me back to the days when I used to look at my natural hair with despair and think about how much I hated it.
I was now able to look at the color with new eyes, though. Over the years, I have done my best to practice radical self-acceptance. It is freeing to look upon my body (one that is not the societal standard for beauty by any means) and say, “So what?” With this practice, I have tried my best to do away with looking at my body negatively. In keeping with this practice, I saw my natural hair color and thought, “Huh, maybe I should try it again.”
So, off to the stylist I went. When the cut and color were finally done, I felt myself actually close to tears. Because here was the color I used to have such disdain for, and instead of feeling that way, I felt pretty. As I’ve lived with it for the last several days, I love it more and more each time I look in the mirror. It’s a reminder that what I was born with isn’t so bad, and that I just have to look with kind eyes to see the beauty.
Okay, so how does this relate to Summer in Like Home? Well, I set out to write a book about a plus-sized female lead where the book wasn’t about her size (you can read the blog post all about that here). In order to do that, however, I had to make sure that Summer wasn’t going through any sort of body acceptance journey. She accepts herself as she is and makes no apologies for her size.
As mentioned above, I aim for the same sort of self-acceptance, but it’s challenging to maintain sometimes. Especially when we are constantly bombarded with ideas about what is and isn’t beautiful and what we should or shouldn’t be ashamed of by social media and the media in general. So, writing about Summer was very healing for me. To write from the perspective of a woman who looked like me and didn’t feel the urge to think about her weight constantly rewired my brain a bit.
By dyeing my hair back to its natural glory and feeling beautiful when in the past I would have felt the opposite, I feel that I embodied my character a little bit. There was power in going back to a color I had previously disliked but now found beauty.
While I know “old money brunette” will fade like any trend, I am so thankful it brought me back to my natural color and reminded me that what I am born with is worthy of being called beautiful. I’m not saying I’ll never go blonde again, but I’m definitely going to hang with this color for a while and indulge in the healing of my inner child. Little seventh-grade me is happy to find herself beautiful, no matter what the rest of the world says.
