Sometimes I forget that my hair is blue. Or I guess it’s not that I forget that it’s blue but I forget that it’s a part of me altogether. I’ll be walking down the street or sitting at the desk at work when a stranger or customer will tell me that they like my hair, or else they’ll squint their eyes at me before asking how often I have to keep it up before I remember that it’s blue. At one workplace I was nicknamed “Blue-Haired Sarah,” because even though I was the only Sarah who worked there everyone knows a Sarah, but not everyone knows a Blue-Haired Sarah1.
Sometimes people will assume things about me based solely on my hair. I’ve been asked if I’m an artist2 or if I’m an actress and I’ve dyed my hair for a part3, most recently someone was surprised I wasn’t a hairstylist4. One time a woman stopped me on the street and told me that she understood me completely, that she too was a runaway and free spirit who used to dye her hair when she was young and wished me luck on my journeys5. I have had people look at me in the mall and tell me they can tell that I am confident, that I am an extrovert, that I am a badass.
It is amazing how people decide who I am based on my hair colour.
But maybe that’s always been the case. Despite being told not to, people judge books by their covers. People judge in general. It’s one of the reasons that it wasn’t until 2020 that I started dying my hair even though it was something I’d wanted to do since I was a tween. When my classmates in high school were dying their hair Rihanna cherry red I secretly thought I was better for having my natural brown hair because I wasn’t seeking out attention6.
As a tween I’d draw pictures of myself with the ends of my brown hair dyed red, not blue, and wearing black and red clothing, including a leather jacket7. Clothes that I thought were cool, that might make me a badass. I think it was an image of myself I wanted to be despite the fact that I was scared by it. The black clothing and dyed red ends were all things that signified rebellion, badness, and even though there was always a part of me that wanted to be the self I drew pictures of I was too scared to actually be her. I just wanted to be good.
And I tried to be good. I repressed myself in so many different ways for this need to be good. But then the scales fell from my eyes. I could see. I stopped going to church and called it stupid, only in recent years acknowledging the damage this mindset has actually caused me. But in that time I allowed myself to buy a tarot deck and removed religion from my life, began to read more widely about topics I wouldn’t have considered before and tried not to feel guilty about the things I had been taught to feel guilty about. And then I started thinking about dying my hair.
Strangely enough dying my hair red was never a thought when I was seriously considering it. I figured if I was going to do it I was going to go all in, not just the ends of my hair as my tween drawings illustrated but my whole head. While I had a point in my life where I did own mostly black clothing in an attempt to look thinner, I never went fully into the punk style. I’ve accepted that while I want to be a Crowley I’ll always be an Aziraphale.
When I was actually starting to plan to dye my hair it wasn’t red or blue, but a dark teal colour called Sea Witch. I thought the dark colour was a good segue into dying my hair, and as someone who has always loved the water and all things witchy the name itself seemed like the best choice. But I had my own anxieties to deal with, like whether or not my new job would accept a worker with crazy coloured hair8. I was so nervous about this that I ended up emailing HR and was told that they’d never been asked that question before9, but since many employees dyed their hair to cover greys their shouldn’t be an issue with me dying my hair an unconventional colour.
But then the pandemic happened, and I knew I wouldn’t be dying it myself because I was afraid of frying all the hair off my head, so I waited until it was safe enough to get it done and made an appointment. Unfortunately my hair dresser at the time bleached my hair so it came out more yellow than white and as a result when the colour was added it ended up looking green. I won’t lie that I was disappointed. I had envisioned myself some teal-haired sea witch mystic but the colour was more of a forest green. But I didn’t hate the green, I grew to love it more than I thought and as I let it grow out I touched it up by putting some dye on overtop the faded colour and the ends of my hair ended up the colour I’d always envisioned it being.
When I decided to get it redyed I knew it was going to be blue, but I didn’t know if I wanted to go with a dark cobalt colour or a bright blue raspberry freezie10. For whatever reason the brighter colour freaked me out, probably because I knew it would mean more people would see it, so it was the colour I went with. I reasoned that if I hated it I could always put a darker dye on top.
But I ended up loving my bright blue hair and have kept it for the past two years. I don’t see myself changing it anytime soon. I’ve considered pink, but really I’ve always been a creature of habit and ease. Blue dye tends to stick in hair so that even when it fades the colour is pretty nice whereas pink tends to fade quickly. And I think the blue oddly suits me. Earlier this year one of my friends was certain I’d had blue hair since high school and was shocked when I reminded him that the blue was recent.
I wonder what that means, to inhabit ourselves so completely that we end up looking and presenting as so totally ourselves that people in our lives forget we ever looked any different. That we become ourselves completely.
All I know is that, as weird as it sounds, when I’m brushing my blue hair in the mirror it looks right. I am always looking right at me.
What Else I’ve Been Doing:
Reading: Currently reading Valley of the Birdtail by Andrew Stobo Sniderman and Douglas Sanderson (Amo Binashii).
Listening To: Ghost
Watching: Season Four of Six Feet Under, Season Two of What We Do In the Shadows, One Pace (Drum Island).
Or they probably don’t.
Not wrong, though my guess is they mean a painter instead of a writer.
Wrong twin.
I guess this makes sense but that’s what my hairdresser is for, because I am afraid of misusing bleach and having all of my hair fall out.
She claimed to be psychic.
We love to acknowledge ingrained religious trauma!
Very grateful none of these pictures exist.
They have ;).
I love anxiety.
Technically it’s called Anime.
💙🩵