The New Rules for Blondes

by Coppock, Selena

  Moving from blonde life to a brunette existence is not to be taken lightly. As a woman with blonde hair, you are often assumed to be a floozy and a ditz, but when you go darker, you are often perceived as smart and perhaps mysterious.

  The hair color chameleon can end up feeling like a fish out of water when she experiments with different hair color, and she may be surprised at her newfound identity and its associated preconceptions. But it is nonetheless valuable to live the experience of the brunette or dark-haired woman, to sympathize with her plight. As a blonde, you are undoubtedly used to getting attention and catching eyes wherever you go, but this life experience isn’t universal. It’s a worthwhile undertaking to experience life “on the dark side.”

  You may be thinking, This book is called The New Rules for Blondes. How is a new rule for blonde life to not be blonde anymore!? I admire your spunk and understand your quandary. My answer is this: It’s always valuable to walk a mile in another person’s shoes (and by “shoes” I mean hair). While being blonde is a delight, we shouldn’t be fearful of experimentation and we should be eager to try out different looks. If you have blue or green eyes, then a rich, dark hair color can make your eyes pop. Additionally, your new hair color and hair-eye combo will allow you to dress in colors that were perhaps unflattering when you were a blonde. I once dallied in a brunette existence, experiencing life through that dark-haired lens. I learned a lot about myself and the world around me. Like a rite of passage that is difficult when you’re in the thick of the drama and trauma but ends up being a character-building personal challenge (changing schools, trying out for the sports team, bra shopping for the first time), life as a brunette was something that was tough at the time but that I now look back on with fondness. I learned firsthand that I can navigate through life’s challenges whether I’m blonde or brunette, even when one of life’s challenges is that I’m a brunette.

  When I jumped on Team Brunette, it was late 2000 and Cameron Diaz had just dyed her hair dark brown post–Charlie’s Angels. She appeared on the cover of Cosmopolitan’s January 2000 issue (on newsstands in early December), which I found myself staring at while I waited in line at the grocery store. Her sultry chocolate-hued sophistication infected my brain with the flawed logic that “if Cameron Diaz looks good as a brunette, then I probably would, too.” It didn’t occur to me that this was a magazine cover that undoubtedly had been carefully lit and photographed for maximum flattery and, on top of all that, the photo was inevitably retouched. Of course Cameron Diaz looked gorgeous as a brunette. And so would I, right?

  These flights of fancy are dangerous for me, as I tend to think that what’s good for a wealthy celebrity is probably good for a civilian like me. Note: This is the goal of advertising in general. Damn you, Mad Men! This phenomenon also occurred during the spring of my senior year in college and resulted in a lot of bizarre photos of yours truly. Around that time, I read an interview with our old pal, hair color chameleon Linda Evangelista, in which she explained that she poses and smiles with her mouth slightly open because a photographer recommended that move to her back when she was a young model. It makes sense for her proportions and the shape of her chin and it has becoming something of her signature move when being photographed (like Tyra Banks’s signature move of “smizing,” or smiling with her eyes). Smiling as if caught in the act, with her mouth every-so-slightly ajar is a fantastic maneuver for Linda Evangelista. I do not have model-like features, and I am not Linda Evangelista (though I loved her work in the video for George Michael’s “Freedom”—she was trapped in a virtual jail made of sweater!), but during the spring months of 2002, whenever a camera was pointed in my direction, I was smiling with my mouth open. Because I should do whatever Linda Evangelista does, right?

  And so it was with Cameron Diaz in late 2000. I was about to leave the United States for a semester of study abroad in London (and an imminent twenty-pound weight gain thanks to a steady diet of curry fries and Strongbow Cider), and I was ready for a change. Cameron Diaz’s blue eyes popped from beneath her new dark-haired locks, so I knew it would make my blue eyes pop, too. And so I drove to Newbury Street in downtown Boston for a visit with a man who served as my mother’s colorist, unlicensed recreational therapist, and spiritual guide, John. You know that your family has a hair obsession when your mother’s hairdresser is a distinguished guest at all of your family weddings. John’s a wise man, and I think he sensed that I wanted to experience life as a brunette, but he knew that I wasn’t ready for all that brown-haired life entails (actually being given speeding tickets and not just warnings and flirtation, not being stared at in bars, not being treated like a rare flower, wearing a lot of jewel-toned shirts, etc.). So he pushed me to go light brown and ease into the brunette experience. We got through the time-consuming single process, and I emerged as a brunette, albeit a light brunette. But I wasn’t happy. I’ve always been like Ado Annie from the musical Oklahoma! With me it’s all or nothing. Let’s either be platinum or dark brown, but nothing in between. If you’re going to go brunette, go all the way. I still believe this. Either go big or go home. You’ve got to bet big to win big and all that jazz.

  Within a few days, I found myself back in the colorist’s chair and John dutifully gave me what I wanted, despite his warnings that bright blonde to dark brown is an extreme change and I would probably, ultimately be unhappy with the severity of the color shift. By nightfall, I possessed a head of dark-brown hair and my friends and family looked me straight in the face and didn’t even recognize me. This is a side effect that you must prepare for—post–color change, friends and family will literally make eye contact with you and not quite process that it’s you. At the time I thought this might be enthralling—to see what it was like from the other side of things. This could be fun! I thought. Immediately, I found that I needed to catch my reflection in every mirrored surface possible to see my new hair—to fully see what the new Selena looked like. Wow—that’s different, I anxiously thought every time I saw myself. I had a little hitch in my heart and an odd feeling in the pit of my stomach. Well, Selena, this is the new look that you wanted, I thought as I tried to digest the fact that the sunlight wasn’t hitting golden highlights anymore. I had to go with it, though—I had gone this far over to the dark side—I had made a choice that I had to live with. I’d imagine that my feeling was similar to that of a woman who says yes to a marriage proposal despite some misgivings. She walks down the aisle thinking, It will be fine. We’ve already embraced this decision and gotten this far down the track—there is no turning back. It will be fine . . . I hope. And without quite knowing what was happening, I began grieving the loss of my blondeness.

  I fell asleep that night as a brunette for the first time ever. When I awoke the next morning, I cracked my eyes open ever so slightly to see brown hair in my face. You know when you’re still half-asleep and not completely aware of what is going on? If you’re staying in a hotel, it’s the half second during which your brain processes the jump from “Where am I? Huh? This ceiling looks weird” to “Oh yeah, I’m not in my bed—I’m at a hotel.” Well, in that half second, in my head I thought to myself, Ewww—there’s a brunette in my bed. Then I came to and realized: that brunette was me.44 I felt like Tom Hanks when he first gets big in the movie Big. He gets exactly what he wished for, but as Metallica says, “Careful what you wish, you may regret it. Careful what you wish, you just might get it.” Perhaps John the colorist was right: I shouldn’t have jumped so eagerly into the deep end of the proverbial brunette swimming pool.

  This move over to the dark side took place a few days before New Year’s Eve. On that first brunette day in late December 1999, I decided to take my new brown hair for a spin and met up with Suzanne for drinks that evening. She had been at the hairdresser that same day and was experimenting with a funky, new haircut that wasn’t so much “funky” as it was a mullet. A freaky lady mullet.

  But Suzanne and I had both wanted something totally new and different, and the no
velty of my brown hair and her mullet still hadn’t worn off. At the bar, we played pool, drank some bad domestic beer, and gingerly danced around the fact that we were both beginning to regret our drastic hair changes. “It’s cool to try something new, ya know? Right?” I asked her, as though I had simply purchased an edgy new shirt for a night on the town—not dropped a ton of cash and hours on hair that was now, seemingly, stuck this way. “Yeah, I mean, if I don’t like this I can always just cut if off and go pretty short, and you can dye your hair back . . . it’s fun!” Suzanne halfheartedly agreed while attempting to toss her newly shorn hair. The mullet mantra of “business up front, party in the back” played out on Suzanne’s head with the hair toss, as the “business” didn’t move much but the “party” swayed gently. We were both up to our ears in denial, the first stage of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous model of the five stages of grief. And we were both grieving hard: Suzanne for her non-mullet hair and me for my blonde hair. We were in the thick of denial, and we didn’t even know it. As I like to joke, denial ain’t just a river in Egypt: It’s also a powerful defense mechanism in which you refuse to accept the reality of a given situation.

  The guy I had been seeing at the time, Eric, was hosting a big New Year’s Eve party at his place, which was a post- collegiate faux fraternity house. On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, I gave him a call to tell him my hair color news (because everyone cares!) and confirm plans for that night’s festivities. He didn’t seem very excited about the news that I was now a brunette, and I tried to play it off as a wacky, impulsive decision that could only come from a super-chill party girl who will try anything once (spicy!). Eric got off the phone quickly, saying that he and his housemates had to run out and buy beer for the party and that he would call me back. Then a few hours passed without a call, so I decided to call his house. This was back in the days of landlines and the potential for you to be away from your phone. The dark ages. Eric wasn’t at the house, allegedly, so I spoke to one of his housemates and left a message. An hour later, I still hadn’t heard from him, so I called again.45 Another one of Eric’s housemates answered. I could just sense that I was getting the runaround and his friend’s insistence that Eric was “still at the packie”46 had to be bullshit. How much time can you spend at a liquor store!? Finally, I laughed on the phone with one roommate and sarcastically said, “He’s still at the liquor store, huh? Well, Happy New Year’s to you all. Bye.” It was nine p.m. on New Year’s Eve, and now I had no plans. Things were looking bleak.

  After making a few last-minute phone calls, I rang in the New Year at a friend-of-a-friend’s house party, where I spent most of the night talking to a random high school girl about how much she hated high school. I feel an odd sense of obligation to listen to angsty teen girls because nobody ever listened to me during those high school years of misery. So I sat there and paid it forward, listening to this stranger’s onslaught of gripes and complaints about the misery and boredom of high school. In the back of my mind, I kept thinking that there must have been a miscommunication with Eric. He must be trying to reach me and furiously calling my parents’ house, right? Or was he just a complete jerk? Why had his feelings changed so completely and so suddenly? That night, as the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1999, the world didn’t explode into some Y2K mushroom cloud of bad computer data as everyone had predicted. Something worse happened: I was stood up. And a brunette.

  A few days later I moved to London to study abroad for a semester and unconsciously entered into the second stage of grief for my formerly blonde hair: anger. My assigned roommate, Mary Beth, had the patience of a saint and listened to my blonde-vs.-brunette ranting without judgment. I blamed every misfortune that befell me on my dark-haired status. Poor Mary Beth, a natural brunette, had to endure hours of my hair color kvetching and blaming. Stubbed toes, missing the Tube, snippy Brits—all were blamed on my brown hair. I was convinced that anything and everything would have been infinitely better if I were still a blonde. As a brunette, guys didn’t even notice me! Nobody was staring at me or chatting me up! I was angry and jealous of women with blonde hair—even subpar blonde hair. I felt like a lady in a coma who can still hear, think, and process what is going on, but cannot talk or register emotion. I wanted to scream, “Is everything so hard because of my brown hair? I’m blonde in here! Hello! Why is no one talking to me!? Get me out of this dark-haired hell!” I received a grand total of one compliment during my time in London, and it came from a muscle-bound bouncer at a cheesy bar. One night he told me that I had nice eyes. Yes, blue or green eyes pop beautifully when you have dark hair—we know this. After he complimented me, I wanted to say, “Of course I do . . . they’re blue and with this dark hair, it’s unexpected, as you normally see blue eyes with blonde hair.” Sigh. Tears.

  I felt like a reverse “Englishman in New York” that Sting so beautifully sang about. I was like an alien, a legal alien living in London as a brunette. Too many unfamiliar things were happening concurrently. It didn’t help that Mary Beth and I managed to alienate ourselves from most of the other American students living in our building. Philip was the sole Brit among us, and he was the resident adviser for the five flats47 in in our gorgeous home on a tree-lined street. The building contained a mess of guys in the dungeon-like basement apartment, three girls on the first floor, a gaggle of ladies jammed into the second-floor apartment like a can of somewhat bitchy and styleless sardines, Mary Beth and me with the run of a three-bedroom duplex apartment on the third floor, and Philip and a motley assortment of American students across the hall from us. In short, Mary Beth and I had lucked out, and for a sweet springtime semester, we shared an apartment that resembled a penthouse in one of the nicest neighborhoods in London.

  Two of the three girls on the first floor were nice, albeit a bit serious and prudish. Those two attended a women’s college and seemed to find Mary Beth’s and my energy and antics barbaric. We were interested in London nightlife, and we went on dates with British and Greek guys—we had fun and met new people, while the women’s college ladies mostly hung out with other Americans who they knew in London. I wanted to tell them to chill out and have some fun, would ya? We’re on a six-month vacation during which we have to crap out a few papers—eat some curry fries and loosen up!

  Those two women’s college girls were sweet, though, which is a whole lot more than I could say for their third roommate. She hailed from California and was crazy thin, super pretty, insanely snobby, and completely intimidating. Her holier-than-thou attitude covered many areas but seemed rooted in the fact that she hailed from the birthplace of Vince Neil and porn. She was so stiff and unfriendly that around her, I felt like an adolescent boy with a crush—I’d stumble on my words, get dry mouth, and freeze up. As I’d try to talk to her and flail around, I’d think to myself, Selena! You are not a sixteen-year-old guy trying to get into a classmate’s pants! You’re just trying to coexist with the snob downstairs—calm down! Mouth, let’s get some moistness back in here, OK? She resembled Posh Spice with her inexplicable ability to pull off a (universally unflattering) pixie haircut and somehow make it work. I guess that a skeletal frame can pull off any haircut, no matter how ill-advised. Her color was fantastic, though; light-brown base with expertly painted golden-blonde highlights. The kind of color that is achieved either with a lot of luck or a lot of money. Her wiry body somehow supported a normal-size head, which gave her that lollipop look made famous by the (allegedly) anorexic cast of Ally McBeal, circa 2000. Because of this lollipop look, Mary Beth and I nicknamed her “Lollipop Guild,” despite the fact that this is a name for friendly dwarves from The Wizard of Oz. Who doesn’t love a good mixed pop culture reference?48

  During my British brunette era, I had a relatively light schedule (because “study abroad” is mostly “abroad” and not so much “study”). Four days of the week I had classes, and one day midweek I enjoyed a totally free day during which Mary Beth was in classes all day. Time for me to receive college credit fo
r hours spent tea-drinking, McVitie’s-eating, and BBC1-watching, followed by some late-afternoon London exploration and pub-hopping. I love education!

  One such morning, Mary Beth and I were both hustling around the apartment. She headed out for a long day of engineering classes while I cleaned up the apartment and finished a quick load of laundry. I went down to the lobby to transfer my clothes from washer to dryer, letting the apartment door shut behind me. I was busy staring at the British currency and wondering if I had enough five-pence coins to ever get my clothes sufficiently dry and fluffy. (I would later learn that British dryers simply don’t do “dry and fluffy,” and you’re lucky to achieve “kinda damp but semitolerable.”) I stuck coins into the dryer, thinking about how this foreign currency felt like Monopoly money, as I still wasn’t totally familiar with the exchange rate just yet. Once the dryer was shaking, I trudged back up three flights of stairs and thought about my day of relaxation at home, only to find the door to my flat closed and locked. I jiggled the handle, but it was sealed tight shut. The door and door frame were in an embrace tight enough to seem vacuum-sealed. This is a door, not a can of nuts that you want to keep fresh—why such a snug seal!? This door wasn’t budging, that was for sure.

  The apartment building, while beautiful and in a gorgeous London neighborhood called Kensington, was also ancient and required large keys at every door. Even worse, construction over there is actually made to last, so I knew there was no way that I could pick the lock with a credit card. Why can’t this be crappy American construction? I thought, staring at my closed apartment door. If I were in a slipshod McMansion in the States, this door would be made of faux wood boarding, it would be completely hollow, and it would pop open if I so much as thought about it. But noooo—construction in England has to be sturdy and well done. Ugh. How come the Brits can’t transfer that level of craftsmanship from carpentry to dentistry? My dreams of flimsy construction and a credit card break-in were useless. Not that I had anything on my person—no credit card, no cell phone, not even a way to escape. That antiquated building required yet another giant old-timey key to get in and to get out. Yes, we lived in a complete firetrap.