The Feminism of Hair Color?

Recently at our face-to-face meeting for the group of women that co-author this site I mentioned that I was looking to start making my hair darker, to bring back the red that I used to love about it.

Everyone looked surprised.

For most of my 44 years I've never entertained the idea of dyeing or coloring my hair, not even for a costume party.  There were many reasons for this stance.

Disgust with the idea that women must be beautiful and that beauty = youth.

A sister who when training as a stylist shared horror stories of the damage done to her and other's hair by the harsh chemical used to perm and dye hair.  I loved my curly, auburn hair (not always but 95% of my life) and was afraid it might be damaged by such treatments.

Feeling that it is an expense that is unnecessary and thus as long as I'm not the primary income earner not really something we need to waste our resource upon.

My mother used to dye her hair as a way to hide her illnesses from us all. When I figured out what was happening this turned into one of our most intense fights of the entire time I lived with her.  How many times did her health get worse because she was hiding things and refusing to see the doctors?  How dare she lie to us this way on top of all the other lies she was telling us and herself?

I recently talked about this in therapy just a bit so if discussion of dead mommy issues distresses you, stop reading now.

One of the factors contributing to my auburn hair was the fact that my mother had strawberry blonde hair (my dad's was black).  In four of their five kids, four of us had auburn hair.  Natural auburn hair isn't common and I grew up feeling like it was a gift I'd been given.  While I never knew what my body should look like and was often told it was fat and ugly or too skinny and ugly, I was always told I had beautiful red hair.

My hair is the one thing I loved about my physical self.

Then it started to go white.

White not gray.  There is nothing in my hair to turn gray. It turns into a golden red, then a blonde, and finally a perfect white.  At first it was only on my bangs and I thought "Cool I can look like Rogue!"  Who wouldn't want to be her?  This image is the one I grew up seeing on TV shows by the way so you can see I was hoping the entire top layer of my hair would go white but not the rest... unrealistic I know but hey, it was a fantasy like the show right?

The whiteness increased as my stress from graduate school increased and then when I couldn't even get a job because none existed in my field right after I finished... don't get me started on that... I felt like it was all for nothing.

Still I didn't dye my hair.

Yet when I saw my friend who is a stylist we talked about dying my hair.  Oh, I asked all about damage and he looked at it and heard what I wanted -- natural, little to no difference from the current red parts of my hair -- but suddenly I was ok with dying it.

I'm not dying it however.  I have too much white now and it simply is unlikely to take but he did recommend this product:


I couldn't find that where he suggested but the good ladies at the shop he recommended suggested this and I am very happy with the results even just after three days!


So what's changed?  As I thought it about it therapy and today I realized what changed is that my mother is dead.

She can't tell me what I should look like anymore.

But more importantly I don't have that strong association of hair coloring = lying to your family.

While I'm not saying that my concerns about beauty and youth are invalid, indeed I think those are very important feminist and humanist concerns. But part of feminism is the idea that women should be able to choose free from pressures that only focus on their biology and attempt to shove them into tiny little boxes that dictate their lives. Now freed from the association between lying to martyr your health I have been empowered to choose and that is very feminist if I do for myself not simply because I feel I should or I must do it to fit into someone else's model of beauty.

So I'm trying it.  I'm using this shampoo and conditioner and I'll see what happens.  After all two days of it my family and therapist said I seemed younger, more vibrant... I think they may mean riveting, huh?