I have an announcement: I am dyeing my hair brown—deep, thick, chocolatey brown. I do this to signal I am entering a period of mental and emotional darkness. I am embracing the winter. I am welcoming in the gloom.
Gone are the halcyon days of being a “bronde.” Bronde me said, “I live in LA.” But brunette me will declare, “I’m thinking of moving back to New York.”
Bronde was a denial of my true self.
With my new dark hair, I declare to the world that I will not go hiking anymore. I will no longer enjoy sunshine and fresh food. I will lurk in my cave and eat dirt from between my toes. I will clutch my black cat to my chest as we watch Melancholia in bed seven times in a row. My hair is brown.
I will no longer wear my nighttime mouth guard prescribed to me by the dentist. I will grind my teeth into dust and subsist exclusively on cream-based soups. The only music I will listen to is the sound of bats scrabbling in caves, with occasional breaks for Donovan’s 1966 song “Season of the Witch.”
I am becoming my truest self.
Some may say that dyeing my hair brown is not the way to signal to the world an emotional transformation—that duty belongs to getting bangs. But I would contend that bangs are experiencing a renaissance and no longer signal surviving an emotional car crash. Consider the bob: Once the uniform of an older, career-oriented, sexless woman, it is now the signifier of a spectacular divorcée entering a libidinous second act. Similarly, bangs—once the external manifestation of internal chaos—now signal a fluffy playfulness, sexily bopping around to Sabrina Carpenter in baby-doll pajamas. Bangs are the phoenix, rising flirtily from the ashes. But brown hair… brown hair is the ashes.
People magazine? No, thank you. I only read authors who killed themselves. I read Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, and every now and then a little Dorothy Parker. (All right, she didn’t kill herself, but she was funny in a mean way. Canonically, very brown.)
Obviously, I am not the first woman to do this. We must always remember our elders. For example, Carrie in the second act of the Sex and the City movie. Only this time, for me, there will be no third-act reveal of highlights. There will be no lightening of my dark brown reality with the false optimism of a balayage. I will not marry Big. He will die alone on that Peloton.
I will stop vacuuming my apartment. Instead, once a month, I will drag my rugs out onto the front yard and beat them with a gnarled wooden stick. If children see me do this, I will curse at them. That is when I’m not glaring at them through the tendrils of my thick, brown hair.
Is this an oversimplification of the stereotypes surrounding hair color? Perhaps. “Look,” you may say, “at the plight of the blonde! Marilyn Monroe, a candle in the wind, snuffed out before her time!”
To this I reply: Marilyn was not blonde. The hair, yes, it was, but the soul? The soul was brunette.
I join my fellow brown-hairs in rejecting the shallowness of life, the bland insipidness of a lighter-haired existence. Yes, blondes may have more fun, but brunettes are more real. More serious. More pigmented.
At least until my roots grow out, or spring. Then I’m going back to blonde.
