Nail Salon - Why I Decided To Dye My Hair - Going Red

Lori, before and after dying her hair red. Courtesy Photos

My female friends started changing their hair in middle school some professionally, some with Sun-In and in high school, even the guys dabbled with bleach. But flip through photos of our group over the years and you ll see no variation in my natural brown. At age nine, I pulled my hair into a Pebbles ponytail, spray-painted it green and went as a troll doll for Halloween and that was the extent of my experimentation. It wasn t that I thought the color couldn t be improved upon, but I was not inclined to mess with a known entity.

So why consider a change after nearly three decades of the same? To be honest, I was bored. I was reading in bed one Friday night when I noticed just how antsy I was feeling. Nothing was wrong, per se I was actually perfectly happy with my life at that particular moment but the whole summer I d been feeling frustrated with the status quo. I was tired of saying same old when friends would ask what I d been up to, and yet I had nothing new to report: same apartment, same job, a few dates here and there that turned into nothing, no big trips planned until much later in the year. I wasn t looking for drama, but I needed something to point to and say, This is something new that I did or In the very near future, I will be doing this very exciting thing. That thing, I realized, could be a new hair color. I could shed my status as the 28-Year-Old Hair Virgin.

With fall approaching and me being too much of a baby to even consider blond, red became my default option. As for the shade of red, I wasn t sure. When you ve had one thing for your entire life, going in a different direction seems that much more daunting. Plus, my behavior at a nail salon goes something like this: Examine colors on display, pick up a bottle and flip it over to look at the name, repeat ten to fifteen times, select a color and sit down to wait, pop back up a minute later to look again, swap out the color, settle into the chair and let the pedicurist remove the previous color, apologize and run back to the display to switch out the shade for something only incrementally different from the initial one. Now that I was going to change something that would be much more visible than my toes, I wasn t hopeful for a sudden surge of conviction. I spent more time than I d like to admit Googling celebrities with red hair , sending around images of Ashlee Simpson, Julianne Moore and Drew Barrymore to solicit opinions. Then, when I was as ready as I could be, Hurricane Irene happened and I had to reschedule my appointment for two weeks later. This gave me time to throw Lindsay Lohan and Hayden Panettiere into the mix and continue to ponder the question that had been on my mind since the beginning: Would red hair clash with the burnt-orange Texas Longhorn shirts that I would be wearing during football season?