I am my hair ....

You’d think i would have learned my lesson by now wouldn’t you?

Having been hitting the bottle since the age of 13 you’d think I’d know what does and doesn’t work well for me.

But before you start scrabbling around to find the number of the local A.A meeting ,don’t worry, for my addiction doesn’t lay in the bottom of a bottle of gin but in the pursuit of finding a new way to accentuate my beautiful plumage .

At birth I emerged from the womb with beautiful strawberry blonde peach fuzz on my head that my dad jokingly enquired of our red haired milkman if he had anything to do with!

 There’s no need for a Jeremy Kyle D.N.A test here though because as I bloomed into a walking talking madam of a toddler my fine thatch gradually lightened into the white blonde that he had had as a kid confirming once and for all that indeed he was my father.

Fast forward about ten years though and that angels halo of wispy white hair has darkened into that shade so boring it’s named after a member of the rodent family, mouse.

There’s a moment of hair excitement around the age of 11 as during the summer holidays I decide that I want to start secondary school with a completely new look and cut off the Status Quo style mane I’ve been cultivating for the past decade into a crop just like the one Keren from Bananarama was sporting in that week’s smash hits but then it’s another 2 years before the real hair experimenting really starts to begin.

As I enter my teenage years I’ve become obsessed by the 1950s and especially Marilyn Monroe, so I want to be as much like my idol as a 13 year old grammar schoolgirl is allowed to be .  I don’t go for the full on platinum blonde just yet but as my mum lightened my hair for me that summer I felt like I looked a million dollars. In actual fact paired with the worst home perm kit 80s money could buy I probably looked a bit more like a crumpled old tenner but hey, it could’ve been worse at least I never experimented with Sun In !

And that is pretty much my hair regime for the next 4 years but once I’ve left school and am able to afford my own dye that’s where the fun begins.

Over the course of the 90s my hair takes in varying degrees of the colour spectrum from platinum blonde to pillar-box red to the shade of deep purple that shocks the manager of the shoe shop I work in so much that I’m banished to the stockroom for the week. Chilli red , chocolate brown and the dark auburn shade that caused one young buck to try and chat me up with the line “ooh you look just like a swan vesta match “.

On into the noughties and leading up to present day we’ve had some badly executed attempts at blonde that turned a violent shade of ginger and yellow, an attempt at red that turned me into Ronald McDonalds twin sister and a gothic stage where my preferred shade of choice was that of the raven.

 However about 2 years ago, I finally cracked that perfect shade of Marilyn inspired platinum and decided this was the hair colour i was going to stick with apart from brief forays into mrs slocombe inspired pastel rinses.

That was, until last week.

Feeling a little bored with my appearance I decided that maybe I needed a change and turning to my latest girl crush of choice Christina Hendricks I decided that copper red was the way to go.

In my mind I would have everyone’s heads turning as i sashayed like her Mad Men character Joan around the area where I lived...In reality though they were just gawping at my head lit up like a belisha beacon.

It won’t be around for much longer now though it’s been issued an ultimatum by my other half; it has to be gone by next Tuesday as he’s refuses to take me to his friend’s funeral like this.

“Anything’s got to be better than that “he says “even pink “.

Pink? Hmm, now there’s an idea!

GIRL FROM THE NECK DOWN COLUMN - MEDWAY MESSENGER