I think that's enough, carrots.

Well, as one of my all time favorite recording artists Shania Twain says, "I gol' darn gone and done it." Sure, Shania is talking about falling in love when she didn't want to (and we can all relate to how terrible that is), where as I am talking about finally dying my hair the one color it has never been: red. Well, it's not really red, it's more auburn. Think Claire Danes' color from My So-Called Life meets Tilda Swinton style. Or I guess we could just leave Claire Danes out of it, because Tilda really has the same color, but My So-Called Life was such an awesome show. Ahhhh, Jared Leto from the 90s.

The intention was not to dye my hair red, but I should know by now that when I settle in with Joey (my roommate who has been doing my hair for the past two years) and have a plan for my hair that it never goes accordingly. This summer the plan was to simply bleach it so I would be super-blonde (like Kelly Bundy in Married With Children.) We certainly got the color right, but we ended up chopping off about five inches as well because all the bleach fried my hair. So my hair looked more like Twiggy's than Kelly Bundy's, but that was alright.

So when Joey and I sat down in the kitchen today, the idea was just to make my hair a darker blonde, as my roots have been growing out for some time now and I wanted to make the distinction between root color and the other color more subtle. Well, when we did it the blonde part got darker, but the roots turned red. This was bad. I never wanted to be a redhead. I don't even like using that word.

So Joey sent me back to Beauty Kingdom to get a different color. It was a bad idea that he didn't come with me, because I purchased a box of brown dye that still had hints of red in it. (I think it was called "bronzed brown", but I didn't pay as much attention to the name of the color as I did to the model on the box who portrayed the color. She was so very pretty.) And Joey doesn't read the box either before he saturates my hair in the dye mixture.

Joey tells me my hair looks purple.

I get up to go and look in the mirror (we are in the kitchen, you see) and he tells me not to. That I should just sit back down and wait to look.

After twenty five minutes and few bites of delicious cheese from the Essex Market, I am face down, leaning over the side of the tub in the bathroom while Joey rinses the dye out. I still haven't seen my hair. I half open my eyes as he rinses and can see maroon-colored water running off the ends of my hair, splattering onto the floor of the tub and snaking toward the drain.

"Joey, this looks red to me."

"Hmmm, well it's not really red, it's more of a burgundy."

I didn't like that.

Well, once it was dried it turned out alright. Alright enough for me to give it a try. I look wiser I think. More sophisticated. No one has seen it yet except Joey. I will report back the reactions of others.

Happy New Year!