When my friends and I gather to play a game of Never Have I Ever, I tend to be one of the first people to lose. However, I always have a card in my pocket that can knock out a large portion of my female friends:
I have never dyed my hair.
Or at least, I had that card until I threw it away when I, on a whim, bought purple dye from CVS and made my friend Gabrielle dye my hair in one of the McBride showers. (Sorry, custodians.)
Now, I’ve been thinking about dying my hair for a while. I always admired girls with the courage to dye their hair bright red or pastel peach. For years, my friend Jackie has been trying to convince me to dye my hair blue. However, something always held me back; whether it was my parents, social anxiety, or just some little fear that I would look ugly. But, when I arrived at Kenyon, I started contemplating the change. And when we stopped by CVS to pick up prescriptions, I yanked a box of Splat! Lusty Lavender off the shelf and handed it to the elderly check out lady (whose eyes burned the fires of judgement.)
And after the terrifying process of dyeing my hair and sleeping on a towel so I didn’t stain my pillow bright purple, I woke up to find, I did it: my head was purple. Moreover, I loved it. The way the purple flutters against my pale-to-a-fault skin is crazy stunning. The lavender locks somehow make my greyish-blueish eyes seem more blue.
Dyeing my hair purple generated a sense of liberation I never felt before. Instead of rebellious, I felt daring. Dyeing my hair wasn’t a massive middle finger to my parents or society. And after dyeing it, I became, in a way, freer.
In fact, my hair looks amazing. Oddly enough, I start to believe I’ve been hiding an illustrious purple fairy inside me all along. A couple days after I dyed my hair, my friends and I walked down to the river to fall into some shenanigans—like cartwheeling in the Kokosing—and to take pictures. My friend Annmarie, an incredible photographer, took a ton of photos of our little adventure. As I look through the pictures, my ethereal and confident appearance stuns me. And it stems from the hair. Dyeing my hair, in essence, helped me find a sense of empowerment. I found autonomy and freedom. It made me feel like an adult—or, at least, an adult with colored hair—not some punk kid who decided to dye her hair purple in the midst of their screw-the-system scene kid phase.
I did not dye my hair to be different from others; I didn’t dye it to be trendy; I didn’t dye it to transform into some Ramona Flowers-esque pixie dream girl fantasy lauded by today’s nerd culture; and I certainly didn’t dye it as a protest against any preconceived notions of cultural standards. Sincerely, I dyed it because it’s fun!
But in that fun, I found a sense of authenticity in myself. Oddly enough, I find I am a person who should have purple hair, which sounds like a strange declaration, but when I consider who I am and who I want to be, having unicorn hair seems like a part of it. For me, dyeing my hair empowered me to accept my authentic self as a mythical, magical, dorky and beautiful fairy queen.
Image Credit: Emma Wang, Annmarie Morrison