Adventures In DIY Highlights
Alt Title: Oh My God, I Ruined My Best Friend's Hair
A few weeks into lockdown, I did a bad thing. (Well, ok, I did many bad things, including completely abandoning any semblance of a day/night schedule and making my own wine out of Welch’s grape juice, but this Bad Thing was special in that it had unfortunate and lasting consequences not just for me, but for others.)
I highlighted my own hair.
Even as I opened the box I could hear my colorist yelling at me from all the way across the city, but whatever, I was bored, and still in the moment of quarantine when it felt like an opportunity to try new things (puzzles! bread making! aforementioned Welch’s grape juice wine!). And highlighting my own hair sounded kind of fun, or at the very least perhaps an opportunity to generate Content (tips and tricks! DIY ideas! distract thyself!)
It came out…well, okay, initially! I used a Clairol Balayage kit, where you basically just paint stripes onto your hair, and sure, it was a little chunky, but it also cost $12 as opposed to much, much more.
Did it fundamentally ruin my hair in a way that I am still dealing with, several years later? Yes, of course it did; more on that in a mo’. But at the time it felt like a relative success, and so I was inspired to do a much worse thing than the first Bad Thing:
I decided to brag about my expert skilzz to my lovely and kind and endlessly-accommodating friend Erin, who – in a flash of shockingly poor judgment – agreed to let me highlight her hair, too.
It did not go well.
Oh my.
Oh dear.
(Somewhat surprisingly, Erin is still friends with me.)
But! Because I enjoy few things more than never, ever learning my own lesson, a few months after this experience I decided to highlight my own hair AGAIN – this time with one of those 1950s-style pull-through caps. The end result of this was that the bulk of the hair around my face broke off into a tiny halo of fuzz, the echoes of which persist to this very day.
When I finally broke and went to see my actual colorist after a few weeks of living with my fuzz-halo, her reaction (after telling me to never, ever do this again) was this:
“Wow. You…have a lot going on there.”
That’s one way to put it.
And so, my friends, we reach our conclusion:
Don’t highlight your own hair. Or your friend’s.
Just don’t do it. Ever.
xo