Aug
22
Thank you so much for the advice on getting a color correction for my botched highlighting job, you guys. I went to a new salon yesterday where I spent a truly shocking amount of time and money, but the results were worth it. My hair isn’t quite the icy bombshell blonde I’d originally hoped for, but the brassiness is mostly gone, it’s lighter and brighter, and she also got rid of the weird two-tone business I had going on where all the underneath layers were dark brown. VICTORIOUS FIST PUMP!
This is where a savvy blogger with decent self-portrait skills would include a flattering After photo, but here’s all I’ve got for now:
One more thing in addition to my gratitude for convincing me to get my shitty hair fixed: The Prowl. The Prowl is a new website launched by CafeMom, and it’s a social shopping site that’s similar to Pinterest. Unlike Pinterest, however, its focus is on specific products that you can purchase, as opposed to DIY projects and recipes and whatnot. It’s also got an ‘Ask & Answer‘ section where users can post questions (“Help me find a comfortable, affordable wedge heel for work!”) or post suggestions to other people’s questions.
I’m currently doing some contract work for The Prowl, but they definitely aren’t paying me to tell you that I really kind of love it and am super-addicted to the Ask & Answer part of the site. That’s just my for real no-shit opinion. God knows crowdsourcing ideas for solving my own small dilemmas has been my M.O. for years, and on the flip side of that coin, there’s something deeply satisfying about browsing through people’s questions and posting my own answers. It makes me feel useful, like I’m some sort of in-demand personal shopper. YOU WANT WEDGE HEEL? I FIND YOU WEDGE HEEL, BRB.
Anyway, check it out if you get a chance — basically everyone I’ve talked to that’s using the site is having a lot of fun. You can follow me here, or check out my boards here. So far I’ve put together four: a collection of mom necklaces, gift ideas for eight-year-old boys (Riley’s eighth birthday is next week, can you believe it?), casual summer dresses you can actually wear a fucking BRA under, and books I’ve been loving lately.
Aug
18
I waltzed into the hair salon with the giddy anticipation of a woman on the edge of a personal transformation. “What are we doing to the color today?” the stylist asked, and I raised my hands and sort of waved them around my head as if my barely-contained excitement was pulsing out of my own follicles in crackling-static waves. I used words like DRAMATIC and TOTALLY DIFFERENT and LET’S JUST CHANGE THIS WHOLE THING UP. Blonde, baby, blonde. I hear they have more fun.
We came to an agreement and even did a mini high-five to celebrate the New Me who would be walking out of the salon with, like, Betty Draper hair (but not the whoah-black-Betty, bam-ba-lam version in season 6), and for a very very very long time she did her thing: foils, foils, more foils, a thousand and one foils applied in meticulously painted crinkly folds as I thumbed through a stack of women’s magazines and did the embarrassed fast-flip past the articles titled 10 Surprising Sex Moves That’ll Leave Him Begging for More (appropriately enough, surprise #2 is always stick your finger in his ass).
Eventually she rinsed everything clean and led me back to the chair and before I had a chance to look she said, “Soooo. Um. The color didn’t really turn out like I’d hoped.” The mirror confirmed it: the roots were lighter, but everything looked mostly the same as it had before. Sort of brownish. But with a new unattractive yellowy-gold tone that added a deeply sallow note to my complexion.
She apologized, said she’d made a mistake with the bleach or dye or whatever it was and that I wouldn’t be charged. I stared at my reflection and worked to suppress the horrifying watery sniffle that I could feel aching in the back of my throat. I mean, who cries over an imperfect highlighting job? Sometimes a salon error is just a cigar, I lectured myself. Stop thinking about tigers and their stripes.
I left feeling vain and stupid and disappointed. A week into it, my new hair — somehow darker than before, glinting with a cheap brassy hue — seems more and more like a metaphor for bad decisions. Not exactly the glamorous fresh-start New Me I’d been hoping for.
-
My product review site:
[