More Adventures in Hair Coloring

Don't look for any photographic evidence of what I am about to describe.

But I do want to remind folks of my June adventure in which I decided to try out a Chinese hair salon for coloring. Despite my best attempts at pointing at a moderate brown color for my hair, I ended up with Party Leader Black. It looked kind of goth, which is not a look that works well for a 54-year-old Italian with sleep issues, so I immediately went out and bought a box of hair color to try to rectify the mistake. Then I went from Party Leader Black to Black-Red. Nice people said they liked the change. They were being nice.

In any event, I’m understandably nervous about venturing into a different salon for a color, so I decided to go out and buy a box of hair color. All of my L’Oreal in a box is in the sea shipment. So much of my life is in that sea shipment. But I digress.

The local supermarket, Wu Mart, does sell hair color. But the choices there, and I kid not, are: black-black, black-red, black-deep brown, maroon, and something called mocha. I opted for mocha, thinking, how bad could it be?

But here’s another lesson I learned today: Don’t assume that just because you’ve done this before and just because you don’t read Chinese, that you should just skip the directions in the little box.

I found out late – too late – that the directions also had a little stick figure mixing the stuff together in a way that I would have understood. Instead, I mixed stuff, but left out the crucial little vial that contained the mocha color. A few minutes after I applied some mixture to my hair, I realized nothing was happening.

I panicked, thinking that maybe I’d end up with hair stripped of all color. White, maybe. I jumped in the shower faster than you can say chachi (Mandarin for mistake), and hoped that I hadn’t done irreparable damage to my hair.

Luckily for me, and less entertainingly for my readers, this story has a happy ending. I’m back to my usual brown hair with gray roots and a few wasted RMBs. There are worst mistakes than this. Here's me about a week ago before the gray started winning.