No More High-Lights!

After looking in the mirror for the past few weeks and wondering "Just who is that?".... I went back to the beauty shop this afternoon and got rid of the brighter high-lights that were colored into my hair about a month ago.

The first time I had the high-lights done, they were soft and golden brown. Very subtle, very nice, and I liked the way my hair looked. This last time, the high-lights had a red tint to them, even though she used the same mixture. Could have been the sun... could've been just because my hair was lighter, so the high-lights made my hair even lighter.

Definitely not me. And it's definitely not my style to be sitting in a beauty shop and wasting my time that way. I don't like to sit in those shops.... idle chatter and old magazines are not for me. My usual trip to the hair-stylist (and I've got a great one!) consists of a quick trim of the ends of my hair. I wash and style my hair every morning, so all Nancy has to do is give the ends of my hair a teensy-bitsy trim every three weeks or so and my hair-style always looks great. (Except on the rainy humid days, when my hair does what it pleases, but that's another story.) And Nancy is good enough to cut my hair dry... my hair is clean and styled when I go in there, so it's very easy for her to see what needs to be trimmed just a bit. Before I started to color/high-light my hair, my visit to Nancy's shop took all of 15 minutes, not 90 minutes.

Between Nancy and I, we had this down to a science. Until I asked for the high-lights the second time. She still gives me great trims, but I wasn't happy with the color of my hair, and the high-light mixture changed the texture of my hair-- made it straighter and a little bit dry.

So right now, my hair is a dark, soft brown, the way it used to be, except that to my eyes, after seeing myself with the lighter high-lights since last year, my hair looks too dark. But this is what I had in the first place, except I had natural gray "high-lights" here and there. And if it hadn't been for both my sister and my cousin, I would've kept those gray high-lights till eternity.

My husband came home from his office this afternoon, after I had come back from the beauty shop. When he left earlier this afternoon, I had lighter hair. When he came back at 5:00, my darker hair was back. Let's just say it was a bit of a surprise. One look from him prompted me to tell him: "Don't say a word. I've been having too many bad-hair days as it is and I just couldn't stand to see that light hair anymore."

Then he asked me if I was going to get high-lights again. "Sure," said I.... "they'll be gray and they'll be back in a few weeks." He asked me if I wanted to go out to dinner. I told him I'm not going anywhere till I wash my hair a few times, which I don't plan on doing tonight, so I'm not going out.

Right now, I look like I have hair color from a bottle, which it is, and which I absolutely hate, hate, hate. Bottle hair-color is exactly that, and it doesn't look natural. There's a reason The Powers That Be have given you your own personal color... it goes with your skin-tone, it goes with your personality, it goes with you. And I can't wait to get mine back. Being that I shampoo my hair every morning, within two or three weeks or so, this deep brown will soften up a bit and will be just fine. Till then, my mantra will be "No more high-lights! No more high-lights!"

P.S. to the little pedometer I've been using since yesterday: I re-set the numbers to zero when I got up this morning. I was wrong about the numbers only going up to 10,000.... maybe they meant it would only count up to 10,000 miles. The number of steps I have taken since getting up this morning at five o'clock is 13,078.

Can you imagine that? 13,078 steps. And it's just barely 7:30 p.m. now. I've always known I'm on my feet a lot during the day, but I never would've guessed that I take that many steps in one day.