I'm tired of having red hair.

I'm getting a lot of grey, and when I color my hair red, the grey comes out neon orange.  Consequently I have to make it a 2-step process - I have to dye my hair a medium brown all over to darken the grey, then I wait another day and use the red color.  Sometimes it doesn't work and I end up with the neon orange roots at the front of my head. 

I'm also tired of having short hair.  As I'm getting older I'm finding that short hair is too harsh for my face.  I have to 'do' it every day unless I want to wear a hat, and there are days that I really don't feel like doing my hair.  I don't feel like washing and drying and gelling and spraying and waxing and pomading and all the rest of that jazz (I don't use ALL those products at the same time, but you get my jist).  I want to be able to tie my hair back in a ponytail or simply let it hang loose and air dry.  I want to be able to put it up if there's an event I have to attend or if Dave and I are going out for a special occasion, I want to be able to braid it or wear it in ponytails and play with it and have many different looks with it.  Most of all, I want my husband to be able to run his fingers through my hair when he kisses me.  I can't do any of those things with short hair, the most I can do with it is change the color or the part or brush it forward instead of back.  It ends up looking pretty much the same, no matter how I do it.

I've decided to grow my hair.  In fact, i've already started.  I haven't had a haircut since the disastrous crop back in November of last year (the stylist got fired, by the way, AND the girl who gave me a horible haircut at the base salon is now working at the base barber shop.  I tell Dave to avoid her when he goes and gets his hair cut - I'm afraid he'd come home bald and missing part of an ear if she got her hands on him).  My hair covers my ears now, and it's so soft and silky....there's a promise of glorious long locks in the growing-out semi-style I have now.  People I haven't seen for a while have commented that I'm growing it out and how nice it looks, which encourages me to keep at it and avoid barber shops and beauty salons like the plague.  I've knitted some pretty head bands to wear and I'm fooling around with different looks - curling it under, flipping it up, blow drying it smooth or scrunch drying it so it looks shaggy and piecey.  I'm simply trying to not get frustrated and cut it all off in a fit of pique.

I'm also not going to be red anymore.  I've had a myriad of hair colors in the past 15 years - red, all kinds of brown (carmel, toffee, chestnut, espresso), I even had black with scarlet streaks in it and when I was a teenager I had fuschia hair.  THAT went over well with my parents and the school.  I had to use three boxes of brown hair dye before all the pink was gone.  I'm not afraid of experimenting with different colors - in the past my hair has always been short enough to where if I didn't like what I'd done, I could either dye it dark brown to cover the mistake or simply get it cut again. I'm lucky enough to have a skin tone that compliments almost any hair color.  Black made my pale skin and blue eyes pop, but if I went out without makeup on it looked horribly un-natural.  The browns were all alright, but they were nothing spectacular.  I can carry any shade of red, but reds fade REALLY quickly and require a lot of maintenance to keep their brilliance.  Yes, there are shampoos that claim to prolong the life of your red hair color, but I can tell you from experience that they don't work as well as they say they do.  My bathroom cabinet is like a history of my hair color - there's shampoos and conditioners for reds, color glazes for browns, silicone to add shine to black hair and a bottle of Manic Panic semi-permanent color in fire engine red for when I had scarlet streaks.

So, having decided that I wasn't going to be a red-head anymore, I now had to decide exactly what color I wanted to be.  Black, as I said, looked un-natural on me when I didn't wear make-up.  Summer is coming, and I really don't like to wear a lot of makeup in the sun - I sweat it off in a matter of minutes with the humidity around here, and I also swim a lot in the summer and try to keep my makeup to a minimal amount of mascara when I'm in the water.  Brown...well, I'm bored of brown.  I don't want to be an espresso or even a toffee.  I want something that lively, that will look natural, and that will blend in with my greys.

When I was a little girl, I had hair so blonde it looked white.  As I grew, the blonde got darker and darker, ending up as a dirty blonde with a few blonde highlights.  My mum called it 'fair hair'.

That was the answer.  Blonde highlights in a light brown/dark blonde base.  I had a similar color a couple of years ago, when I was growing my short hair out, and I got a LOT of compliments on it.  I was working patrol at the time, and people would come up to me when I was stopped in my patrol vehicle and tell me my hair was beautiful.  So, I figured that that's the color I should go for again.

Yesterday afternoon, I put a light golden brown color on my hair as a base color.  This morning, I put some mid-blonde highlights in it, and next week I'll put a few lighter blonde highlights in it.  I'm going back to my roots, back to my childhood color and the color I had a few years ago. 

I'm going blonde. It'll blend the grey away (the grey I have is very light, almost white - the blonde will blend in with that really well) and it'll be a nice beach-y summer color.

Dave and I used to listen to Clapton's 'Wonderful Tonight' when we were first dating.  There's a line in it about how Clapton's girl 'puts on her makeup, and brushes her long blonde hair', and Dave used to substitute "short red hair" when he sang it to me. 

I'm going to change that.