Red Hair, Sir, in My Opinion, is Dangerous
Ruminations on hair color and identity
Growing up, I adored The Little Mermaid.
I watched the movie and listened to the soundtrack countless times. My bathing suit, backpack, lunchbox, and notebooks all featured her image. Every Halloween I dressed up in some iteration of her green tail/purple shell top outfit. Ariel was hands down my favorite princess. It wasn’t even really a competition.
As much as I desired Belle’s bookshelf or Jasmine’s boyfriend, I genuinely wanted to be a part of Ariel’s world. More than anything, I liked her hair.
My interest in redheads didn’t wane as I grew up. I loved As Told By Ginger’s namesake heroine and her maroon coils. Emma Stone’s iconic locks in Easy A were also on my teenage vision board. I wanted Carrie’s hairstyle but with Miranda’s fiery shade. I wanted Julia Roberts’s iconic Pretty Woman auburn curls. I even toyed with a lust for Grace Coddington’s vibrant mane or Hayley Williams’s style circa the Paramore album All We Know is Falling.
My hair looked nothing like any of these people. If anything, it was mostly compared to Rapunzel’s. Long, wavy, and blonde. I was relatively light when I was young, but darkened with age. My tresses bordered on brown in the winter and faded near white following long summer days. I hated the term “dirty blonde,” no matter how accurate.
I didn’t enjoy being blonde. As I got older, I felt that people—mostly men—talked down to me because of it; the old stereotype of light hair equating to fewer smarts totally inescapable. But despite this distaste, I was scared to change my look throughout college. This was in part due to the cost. A copper-colored specialist in New York can charge upwards of $500 for a good dye job. I worried about paying for something that would wash out, and that I might end up hating. There was also the broader worry of others not liking it and sharing their negativity. I may not have ever felt right as a blonde, but folks who weren’t assuming I was an idiot did like my hair. I’d never needed compliments, yet feared how I might fare without them.
Then, a moment of madness took over before my last semester at NYU. I’m not sure if it had to do with not hearing back from graduate schools, not having job prospects, or not having any idea what I would do in the real world. But something in me snapped on holiday in England. I asked my cousin, a professional stylist, if she could dye my hair.
The experience didn’t go as planned. I hoped my color could resemble my cousin’s. She’s a natural redhead who’d added highlights over the years for tone and texture. Something fresh yet still realistic. I’m not sure if we had a miscommunication or a timing issue, but that’s not what I got. Instead, I turned to face the mirror and saw my light strands were now almost carrot-esque, with the occasional lighter fleck here and there. I certainly didn’t feel like myself. And I felt horrible when my mother saw me and muttered, “I don’t recognize you.”
After six weeks of crying, constant washing, and hat wearing, followed by a trip to a stateside hairdresser, my locks went back to blonde; a slightly different tone than I’d grown accustomed to, one called “honey.” It scratched the itch for change for a while. Some friends teased me about my “red hair phase”—which, according to Urban Dictionary, is the period in a woman’s life during which she’s so unhinged she thinks dying her hair will heal her—but the subject was otherwise left to lie.
I thought I’d made peace with blonde. Not loving it, just living with it. Then the pandemic happened, and my hair color became one of many things I started questioning.
As bad as the red experience was my first time around, I also found myself remembering the positive things. My green-dominated wardrobe looked fabulous. Fewer people questioned my authority or raised eyebrows if I made dirty jokes. Plus, I’d been hit on a bunch, which was, for the most part, kind of exciting after years of mom-friending in the background. I maybe wasn’t ready for so much change at once, but going red did do things for me that blonde never had. I didn’t want to lose that entirely.
I went back to my stateside hairdresser at the end of 2020 and asked if we could try again. She’s a redhead, too; a bottle-assisted one. She knew the drill. Slowly, we stirred ruby pigment into my color process, working our way up every few months from honey, to strawberry, to my current golden copper shade. Each session had me feeling lighter, happier, and more myself than I ever had before.
For me, red hair is not a phase but a lifestyle now. I’m Ariel when I’m swimming in the summer, Anna in Frozen come winter, and Merida from Brave on less orderly days. Best of all, my rich outside finally matches my fiery personality inside. And I think my mother might almost approve.
Rachel’s Weekly Recs:
I’ve been craving tacos this week. My go-to local is Street Taco, a Mexican street food-inspired joint with an actual taco truck inside. They offer old school favorites such as Carne Asada and Pollo Asado, alongside fresh ideas, including Tuna Tartare and Ceviche samplers. Is your stomach growling yet?
Sticking with the Little Mermaid theme, I started the audiobook for Part of Your World by Abby Jimenez. It’s the first in a trilogy set in Minnesota about an ER doctor falling for an inn keeper she meets because her car gets stuck in a ditch. It’s a sweet, sexy time. Get your copy from Jimenez’s local bookstore, Magers & Quinn in Minneapolis.
This election season, I’ll be rocking my favorite HRC Ban Bigots, Not Books t-shirt. Not only is this one of the comfiest shirts I own, 100% of the proceeds go toward the Human Rights Campaign’s fight for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer equality.