Color Me Bad: The Prologue

Ah hair salon puns. I just love them. Whoever came up with "Hair's What's Happening" and "Curl Up and Dye" made the world a better place.

But what happens IN the salons actually isn't so good for the world. In addition to increasing your risk of five different kinds of cancer, including the Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma that killed Jackie O, hair dyes can contaminate runoff and add particularly icky/off-gassy waste to our landfills.

This is troubling news indeed for those ladies with premature grey, or those whose natural color has been described BY OTHER PEOPLE INCLUDING MY OWN MOTHER as "dish water" and "mouse poo". So as Phase II of my personal Non-Caustic Cosmeceuticals campaign, I decided to look for an eco workaround.

First step: the World Wide Web. Copious Googling revealed that there's not a single natural professional dye on the US market, unless you count those used in Aveda Concept Salons, which I don't. I've been to one - good smells, mediocre styles.

Step two: home dying. I am no stranger to this process. In the best case scenario, you permanently stain only two or three towels and manage to color ALL the hairs on your head. In the worst case, you stain two towels, the tile grout, the shower curtain, the bath mat, your shirt, your jeans, your face and your boyfriend AND miss a big spot on the back of your head that your friend Rene has to come over and remedy the next weekend.

So the ideal situation would be to find a natural home dye and convince my awesomely disdainful longtime Pac Heights stylist, Lucas, to apply it for me.



Problems here are twofold:

1) Did I mention that he's disdainful, especially of my sustainable lifestyle? He calls my organic vegan shampoo "that twig shit".

2) All the dyes from Walgreen's are out because they contain just as many if not more chemicals than the pro varieties. Which means Rainbow Grocery which means, Holy Shit...henna? My mom used henna throughout my childhood, whipping it up with coffee in a big metal bowl and prancing around the house like a chimney sweep had sneezed on her head. Then she'd rinse it out, spiral curl, put on her Contempo Casuals harem pants and leave us with the babysitter while she and Dad went out for sushi.

These are not good memories.