Blonde on Blonde

By Noamme Elisha
Illustration by Kirsten Miranda

Dying hair is a lot harder than it looks – especially if one tries to go from pitch black to platinum blonde. I didn’t realize this until after my friend’s hair (and her clothes, and the bathroom floor, and the mirror) was covered by two large bottles of bleach-white hair dye.

Flashback to earlier that day: I was on my way out of the dorms to go see the finals of the “Louder Than A Bomb” poetry slam when my friend comes into the lobby with a Sally’s Beauty Supply bag.

“I’m going to dye my hair blonde,” she says.

“You’re… retarded,” I replied, “but there’s no way in hell that I’m missing this.”

So I abandoned my trek to the poetry slam and went up to her room, putting on some gloves and thus becoming North State’s hairstylist extraordinaire.

Illustration by Kirsten Miranda

Hair dye smells terrible, in case you were wondering. The fumes made our eyes water, and frankly, I’m surprised the smoke detectors didn’t go mental. It took about thirty minutes to apply blonde-cream onto every single black strand of hair. In case you’re wondering, the average person has between 100,000 and 150,000 hairs on their head. For our purposes, that’s about 0.012 seconds of attention per hair.

She walked into the shower, and came out with a towel over her head.

“Well, let’s see it,” I said. She slowly removed the towel: It was super-white on the top and faded into a weird orangey/red color with random splotches of blonde.

“Aaahh… well at least it’s art-chic?” I tried to be optimistic.

“You know what,” she said slowly, “I’ve got a job interview tomorrow.”