Beacon in the Dark...

Or something like that.

Saturday night at the Teddy Bear Toss a friend of mine found me by my hair. 

Sold out, crowded game. He knew sort of the area where our seats were but had just told his wife "I'm not sure how I'm going to spot her...oh never mind. There she is."

My hair was a bright red homing target. 

Now to be fair I did just get it colored Saturday morning so it was at its absolute brightest but it was still really funny. 

The week before the checker at Fred Meyer asked me if it was natural. Oh, honey, no. And anybody who has this color hair who tries to tell you that it is is lying.

My hair is a red not seen in nature. Unless I'm on a hike...

It started out as a very subtle red. I had posted about how I used to change it up during the fall. There was a box dye that I used, the wash in wash out type. Lasts a few weeks and fades away to nothing. And I was getting tired of how dull my hair was looking. I like my natural color. Or colors I should say, there are a lot of them in there. And I like the grays that are coming in. They are very silver and pretty. But aging and the kink to the gray were making my hair not as shiny as it used to be (the reason my hair has always been so shiny, or part anyway, is because of how straight it is, straight hair is shinier than curly hair). 

So, anyway, Sara finally convinced me to do a color wash to my hair. It would add that red and that shine and if I didn't like it, it would just fade out. 

So I did.

And nobody noticed. 

It was really subtle. I could see it. And especially in the sun you could see it. But it was just a really subtle picking up of the natural red I already had. So she got out the dye and went darker. 

And then darker again.

And darker still until finally someone said something about the change. 

Then I think we went a few shades darker just for fun. 

During the pandemic I couldn't get it colored for awhile, and the red started to fade, but it just went to paler red. A more natural looking red, actually. It faded nicely. Which is always a worry with red dyed hair. It often doesn't stick around. Fades quickly and it sometimes not very attractively. But mine doesn't fade too badly, it gets lighter, but it's still a pretty deep red even the day before it's time to get it refreshed. During the pandemic it just faded more than that to a more rust colored red. 

And even though my hair stopped growing during the pandemic and I didn't have the large root line that a lot of people did I decided to try going back to my natural color. Sara did some finagling to bring it closer to my browns and...I hated it. 

I went two cycles with it and still hated it. 

I don't think women need to dye their hair to look younger or to cover gray. If all of my hair would go gray I would switch to that. Like I said my gray is silver and I really like it. There just isn't enough of it. So I have a mix of brown (browns really, a few shades of brown), black, blonde, red and gray. And when I tried going back to that mix it just didn't look like who I was expecting in the mirror. Which is hilarious considering I had had red hair full time for like 4 years by that point versus the almost 50 with brown. 

But the red is me. 

So maybe it is my natural color. As unnatural as it is. 

And it helps you to find me in a crowd.