A Short History on My Hair

So a few of you have asked for a pic behind this post.

Let me pre-cursor this post by saying that although I thoroughly believe I do have a "communication problem" with all hairdressers, I by no means think that the end result of my latest hair-capade turned out bad....it's just not what I had envisioned me walking out with when I originally stepped into the salon.

Now for a little bit of history. As my step-mom commented, it is true that my hair has had "style" to it ever since I was a little kid. My mom was the type that always wanted her little girl's hair to look nice. This included those huge teased bangs in the 80's that left little ol' Ashley afraid to play outside at recess on windy days.

It's true. I would hang out in the door alcoves during recess hoping that the wind wouldn't swirl in and ruin my 'do (how sad...my obsessive compulsiveness can be traced back to grade school). I remember one day we had to have recess in the rain, and there was no escaping it. My poofy bangs got flattened, and I felt like the ugliest kid ever. I even tried to get my second grade teacher to allow me to call home "sick". Sick.

Anyway...my overall qualms about discussing my hair with hairdressers began with a very tragic incident about a week before I started my seventh grade year of school. It was the beginning of junior high. A time to debut into the world of semi-adulthood, and the time to fear that you had to keep your eyes to yourself in the hallways because if you didn't, the gang members would "cut" you (but that's a completely different story...let's just say I forgot I grew up in the relatively low-key streets of Sandy, Utah rather than a borough in the Bronx).

Anywho...Being the hair-conscious mother that she was, my mom took me to her hair stylist to get a nice trim on my shoulder length bob right before school was to start. I went into the afternoon with the expectation that my hair wasn't going to change much, but that a professional touch-up on my highlights (my mom had always done them herself) just might make me one of the coolest kids in school. And then it happened....

The man (yes, man) started cutting, and kept cutting, and cutting. I remember thinking to myself as I looked in the mirror, "Something is going horribly wrong." About twenty minutes in, I was in tears. I realized there had been a coup, and my mom had told the stylist to give me one of those hip-and-with-it shag cuts (you know, the ones that were so edgy---for forty year old moms!!!!). As I was crying, the stylist was getting nervous and somewhat angry. He even told me he couldn't finish if I kept crying. Really? As if stopping mid-cut could really make it any worse? I ended walking out of the salon with this:

[Please disregard the scribbling over the picture. I couldn't find anything but my year book picture (probably because everything else has long since been burned) to illustrate the end result]

I will admit that it was a skillful cut, but nothing that a bunch of pubescent teenagers roaming the halls of junior high would ever understand. It led to much ridicule and taunting, and even a junior high career nickname of "Elvis." I know. Perhaps the worst side effect though, was the hairstyles that followed for a couple years as I attempted to grow it back out (yes, my hair grows slow).

So that experience has left me scarred for life. Now that I'm a big girl and I have control over my own hair decisions, I've always noticed that no matter how prepared I go into my hair appointment to illustrate what I want done (I'm talking everything short of a PowerPoint presentation showing the hairdresser how to do it), I always walk out of the salon with "not exactly" what I had imagined.

A few weeks before Kaeden was born, I had decided that my old hairdresser was getting overpriced and impossible to book an appointment with, and thus I had to move on. I got a referral from a friend and went to a new lady. I took a picture in (of me, no less) of what I wanted (a lot more blonde), and what I came out with was a caramel color disaster. Okay, so it wasn't horrible, it just looked like it was taking the steps in the right direction, and then took a serious face plant. Not to mention....I told this hairdresser in the beginning, "I do not like layers. I just like a little grading at the ends to give some texture (these sound like technical terms don't they?). Just trim my hair like I already have it." At one point during the haircut she asks, "Do you mind if I clean up these layers? They are just cut in such the wrong direction" as she takes a huge snip before I could interject. Needless to say, I was not happy, and I was full of layers. This then led me to frantically find another hair dresser in a different salon the next day who I put to the task of fixing my color. Two full-priced salon visits later...my hair was livable again.

This leads us to my most recent appointment. I have been trying to grow my hair out for quite some time now. My husband says he thinks I've been growing it out ever since we've met. This is true, but like any girl, I get to the point where my hair just feels like a stringy mop used to clean bathrooms, and I need a change. Because of my "lovely layers" added during my previous haircut, I was left telling my new hairdresser that I wanted her to even out the layers again. This meant about 2.5" taken off the back (so sad...it takes me so long to get that). As for the color I told her I wanted it to look like this:


This required darkening the bottom portion of hair slightly, and then just fixing my horrible roots while foiling in a few more highlights. This is what I was left with:



Like I said, I actually really like it (I was planning to go dark again in the winter anyway), but it's just not what I thought I was going to get as I practiced my speech (I'm not joking) earlier in the day. Go figure.