The Inspiration of Technicolor Hair

I was recently in the Bay Area about to head out on a road trip with one of my best friends.  We've known each other for twenty years now, and continue to have adventures together.  As we were packing for the trip, my friend found a tube of green hair color she'd bought quite a few years back, when I'd been doing a round of technicolor hair and she'd been contemplating giving a few unnatural highlights a try but then she just never did.  However with my hair back in an unnatural but luminescent purple state, she got curious again.  And we did have the who.e afternoon open...

She wanted her hair cut short as we were about to be in the desert for a week, so using some clippers I gave her a haircut and then applied the "lime spider" hair stain.  It came out great and was a lovely bright shade.  That evening we went out to dinner.  We were walking down the sidewalk, heading to a Thai restaurant when a woman who was on the verge of entering a nearby apartment building with her dog suddenly reversed her course of action and started to ask me something.  She'd been so abrupt in her actions that she shut her dog inside the building entry way and got stuck trying to walk over to us!  and what made it even funnier was what she said next:  "What do you use on your hair?"

That I did not expect.  She told us she was in her early 60s, and had been repeatedly considering dyeing her hair bright turquoise for several months.  Then she noticed she wasn't just talking to a purple-haired person but a green-haired person as well.  My friend and I shared the technicalities:  the purple was bleached then dyed with Manic Panic and Punky Color, the green was natural hair with Fudge Paintbox on it.  And when the woman talked about "the kids these days" and their dun hair, we revealed the two of us are in our mid to later 40s.  That she did not expect.

Strangely the sound of a minor fender-bender from a nearby intersection sort of derailed the conversation, and we all said goodbye and went on our ways without even exchanging names.  Over dinner my friend asked me if I thought the woman would really decide to dye her hair turquoise.  I said there would be no way of knowing for sure, but that if she didn't dye it after talking to the two of us, she probably never would.

The moral of the story is it's just hair so if some brilliant color calls to you, why not answer?  The cost is minimal, the effort isn't much and you'll never know until you try.