Emily is 32 and lives in Boston with her funny boyfriend. She is a beauty school dropout who cannot stop cutting her own hair. She can be found obsessing about cheese and her cat at Pretty Crabby or talking about products endlessly at Tallulah Blue. She has not seen her real hair color since 1990.

Last week I was trying to decide what color I should dye my hair.

I have been brown for awhile (since I did what my friend Angela calls the Autumnal Dying of the Hair back in the fall) and it is okay but I have trouble keeping it the color I want for any length of time. I have tried using fillers and deep conditioning (like I suggested some other folks should try in my last post) but nothing seems to STICK for me for very long. The blond I have been doing for years and years always peeks through. My friend Suzanne calls this “trying to hold back the sunshine!”

All week I was thinking brown or blond, brown or blond? And I finally decided, okay I will go for something somewhere in the middle. This was my first mistake. I should know by now that no MIDDLE colors ever come out right. I think you have to go for something dark or something light. Don’t try to be wishy washy and be “somewhere in the middle”. It never works out.

I ended up choosing a color called something like “dark natural blond”. There is my second mistake. How can it be DARK and NATURAL BLOND?! I have never had blond hair which was either dark OR particularly natural. So my other tip for you is stay away from color names which don’t make any damn sense.

Dark Natural Blond on my head ended up looking something like Icky Weird Brown. It’s kind of reddish, kind of goth, way too dark. Not blond. Not natural. Ugh. One thing I did when I took the towel off my head (after I screamed that is) was to immediately wash my hair twice with dish soap. This is as unpleasant as it sounds but when your hair color comes out too dark it does help get rid of some of the extra dye right away. I think it saved me from looking too much like Evan Rachel Woods. At least I hope so.

www.zimbio.com

Have you had hair color disasters? How have you made it through? You know, aside from booze and therapy.