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A Good Day for Blue
Clementine Smoak
Issue 90, September/October 1998
My daughter and her friend started out a summer afternoon together dyeing their hair in the bathroom, which was swathed in clear plastic garbage bags. Actually, they started with un-dyeing their hair, because apparently all hair must be pale ("like the inside of a banana peel," I'm told) before it can be turned into new and attractive shades of blue and purple.
It wasn't only the bathroom that was plastic-protected: Both of the girls were also draped in a combination of trash bags, Old clothes, the plastic gloves I bought for flea-dipping the dogs, and shower caps. Since this venture was being approached cautiously, initially the shower caps had only one hole each, with a strand of hair shooting out the hole. It was if their heads were tubes of hair and someone gave them a squeeze.
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One of these strands started out dark brown and was bleached to the color of French bread crust. The other, my daughter's, started out the color of the crust and was transformed into the color of a bleached worm or, in technical dye terms, the inside of a banana peel.
The preparations for this adventure took hours. Besides covering everything in the bathroom with shimmering film, they read and reread the directions. Before they started the actual procedure, I was invited to come see the set-up.
"Very organized," I commented as I looked around quizzically at the small bathroom, which now had sort of an operating room appearance. There was a timer on the shelf near the sink and another large plastic garbage bag, only this one was actually to be used for trash and was taped open to the window. The directions were clothespinned to the shower curtain, and there were two plastic cottage-cheese containers to be used for bowls. After fruitlessly searching our house for petroleum jelly, the girls made a brief trip to the friend's house for Vaseline, which now sat waiting and open next to the timer. There was also a longer trip to the kitchen, just in case, and so now the bathroom also held a water bottle full of chocolate milk, two oranges, and a bag of potato chips.
I'm not sure how this happened, I do remember my hair briefly being red at about the same age, the red of the American flag, so maybe there are hair-coloring genes that have been lurking for 30 years. When I was a child, my mother had auburn hair, which was still auburn when she was a young adult, then lightly streaked with grey, then grey-free and deeply auburn again. Some of this could be attributed to the natural passage of time, but some probably came from another source.
But I think this bout of dyeing came from the discovery of body decorating. Body decorating for this daughter started with a stubborn disinclination toward washing, combing, and general cleanliness. There was a progression through showering without adult direction, requests for new clothes, ten rings on each hand, and the frequent use of a mirror We are now to earrings, nail polish, lipstick, and blue hair. All this happened in the space of ten months. One school year. I swear. If I could change that much in only ten months, who knows what I could accomplish.
I am glad this happened with my third daughter and not my first. Probably if she had wanted to dye her hair blue, I would have felt self-conscious about it. I remember when I was ten or 11, my friend Paul got a Mohawk haircut. His mother, Mary, refused to walk down the same side of the street with him. There have been so many moments in the last 21 years of parenting when I've sympathized with Mary. This has usually been about clothing, however, not hair. Holes in the knees of jeans, mismatched socks, pants that follow my girls down the street, like a train of denim: Sometimes my tolerance has wavered.
But oddly, this blue hair has not had that effect on me. Because, of course, these two 13 year olds now have streaks of color in their hair. My daughter has an impressive blue river that flows from her scalp and down the right side of her face. It is as blue as, well, blue hair, which I've seen many times in the last few years. Interestingly, the last relative I knew with blue hair was my grandmother, but hers was a lighter, more ethereal blue that floated perfectly on her head after her weekly hair appointment. So maybe even the blueness is in the genes of our family.
"Do you like it?" asked my lovely blue-eyed-and-haired daughter, as soon as the dyeing was complete. I couldn't find the perfect words right away, so I stalled.
"It's so hard to tell when it's wet," I said. "How about blow-drying it?" That gave me only about four minutes of reprieve, and suddenly I was on the spot again.
"Well?" she asked with a happy smile and that was my clue. I suddenly realized that this was one of those moments in your child's life when she will always remember what you said.
"It's beautiful," I answered. And then, because I've read all those parenting books that tell you not to just admire but describe, too, "It's so blue." She nodded and went off to look in the mirror again.
Next came her friend. Two colors had been added to her original dark tresses. There was a wide stripe of color that could best be described as the other side of the banana peel. This had been enhanced with the blue, only it looked different against the yellow and the brown; more, urn, green. She also had about ten colored pony tail elastics wound around sections of her hair. These were distributed all over her head, like bright-colored worms (why does that image keep coming up?) and turned out to be the sites of potential color changes.
"What do you think?" she asked me. It seemed like an unusual hairstyle to me but once I understood what I was seeing, I gave my opinion, which was maybe they should give it a day before doing any more. Advice which unfortunately didn't fit in with the vat of hair bleach they had stirred together and which even now was decaying in the air. But a solution to that problem came just in time.
Two of my stepchildren arrived home from day camp and were immediately sucked into the hair salon in the bathroom. High enthusiastic voices could be heard, as my daughter and her friend sold the idea of stripes of bleached hair. Soon there were two more children in the house walking around in clear shower caps with strands of wet locks hanging out. My stepson was also making dinner, so he put on two shower caps, because, he said, he didn't want to get chemicals in the food.
These bleachings were so successful that my stepchildren decided to go for more strands. My stepdaughter brought me a shower cap and a pair of scissors, asking if I could select the next two strands, make holes in the cap, and pull the hair through them. Having no hair bands, I used paper clips to mark the sections of hair, and she left with two more tufts ready to be transformed.
At dinner that night the children got into a discussion about the mother of one of their friends. My 13 year old thought she sounded really weird. Scary, in fact. I looked at her blue hair, now parted in the center so it framed her face; I looked at her friend, now also wearing two shower caps; I looked at my stepdaughter, the elastic of another shower cap encasing her hair; I looked at my stepson with one strand of orange hair contrasting beautifully with his dark, dark brown hair, and I questioned the definition of the word weird. I thought maybe they could be considered a little unusual themselves, I told them. This remark was acknowledged by glances at each other, but there was no agreement.
And as I looked at all these new shades of hair, streaked in with the old, I have to admit I liked what I saw. I was even tempted to have a few highlights put in here and there myself. That urge, along with the fact that I own a skin-tight black leather skirt and have considered a tattoo, gives me hope. Check with me in ten months.
Clementine Smoak now lives in Albany, California, where she and David Danby share parenting responsibilities for six children, ages 11 to 22. She has been a newspaper columnist for the Albany Journal, the Family Literacy Coordinator for Alameda County, a Hot Wheels librarian, jails librarian, and has owned a business, We Follow the Story, supporting new mothers and fathers. She currently teaches cooking classes for kids.
