Thursday, April 10, 2008

Amazing Grays, Not!

Oh, the quandary over what to do about aging hair! You lucky guys who can decide at some point to shave it all off and look clean and macho rather than worry about receding hairlines and telltale gray.


My last trip to Hair Cuttery produced a nice color. The hair is colored and then what is known as a partial highlighting is done with aluminum foil. The process cost over $100 with tip. I expected it to last a while at that price. But here we are about two months later and there are more than a negligible amount of aging roots. 

I have quite a few friends with beautiful, soft white shiny hair—Susan Odyssey most recently, Larry and Susan Shipper, Elsa Wachs. I wouldn't mind if my hair looked like that. But my roots look to me like a combination of gray, brown and white, and a pretty mousy combination at that. The hairdresser agreed with my assessment. So today, I asked if there is some secret dye that one uses to get aging hair to look like that until one gets old enough to produce the monochromatic variety naturally. She was polite enough not to laugh at me and was able to appear only mildly amused at my question. No dye achieves that look, but once you get there, there are special shampoos to keep it shiny white. 

What to do now?! I don't want to spend $100 every two months to maintain a color that only looks good for one month. I don't want the mousy natural look. I don't want to buy hair dye in the supermarket and go through the messy process at home, not to mention the experimental nature of trying it out for the first time. I don't want to keep running back to the salon to have my roots touched up. I opted for an all-over foil highlighting in a much lighter blonde so that, hopefully, as the roots grow in ever lighter and blend with the blonde I will be ready and able to recognize and take advantage of my aging roots while maintaining some semblance of an attractive hair color. The cost for this procedure with tip was $100. Supposedly, the touchups are not as expensive. I hope it looks okay longer!

I think this is my final attempt at looking presentable until my beautiful white head of hair appears. If this doesn't work, I'm going with mousy from now on.



5 comments:

Ari said...

Ah, yet another instance where learning how to use the camera might have come in handy...

I know, I know. Small steps.

I guess I'll have to reserve judgment for Saturday when I get to see it in person!

baenigma said...

You can always ask Erica to color your hair for you. It will still be from a box, but having someone else do it for you significantly reduces the mess factor. Plus, it is much cheaper. Erica also does a good job, after all she did used to do it professionally...

Ari said...

If you think you've got problems, you should see what happened to Matt Katz...

http://engagedguy.blogspot.com/2008/03/blonde-over-blonde.html

Marilyn said...

Just looked at Matt's blog. He is a brave man allowing Deb free rein and then putting the results out there for all to see. You are supposed to frown in the "before" shot and smile in the "after" shot so that everyone can tell how much better you look.

The Today Show had an extreme makeover today in which they took a beautiful 60-year-old with gorgeous white hair and, of course, got rid of it with a dark color to make her look "ten years younger." By those standards, grandmom should look about 40!

Matt Katz said...

You're right about the before/after shots! I knew I was doing something wrong...In any case, the color didn't last. My barber was horrified and he gave me a high-and-tight haircut this morning. My days of coloring are behind me (until I go gray).