I Lost All My Hair at 19

And it didn’t teach me any magical lessons

From a very young age, I wanted pink hair. I spent years begging my parents to let me dye my hair to no avail.

Luckily, I had a fun aunt. She’s the one who got my ears pierced years before, when my parents wouldn’t let me. Now, she was the one who was going to get my hair dyed after my parents refused to.

She reasoned, rightly, that my parents would never forgive her if she let me go pink, but she did get a hairstylist to add red streaks into my brown hair.

My parents were surprised, but the color grew on them and they eventually let me go completely red.

Over my teen years, I tried different shades of red, I added black stripes to my hair, but that’s about as much as I was allowed to do while I still lived under my parents’ roof.

So, once I left home and moved in with my boyfriend, I started experimenting. I tried out all the flashy, non-natural colors I wanted to. I went crazy.

In fact, I went a little too crazy, and it resulted in me losing all of my hair.

Bleach Job Nightmare

Being a grown adult woman meant finally getting to having pink hair. I could also try purple. And blue. And green. Each time, I’d just have to fade the color out with a bleach treatment and dye it all over again.

I finally had the brightly colored hair I wanted since I was a child, and I felt great about the way I looked.

Until I tried dying it black.

I thought black hair would look cool on me. It didn’t. My skin is way too pale. That sounds like the perfect combo to come out looking like a goth princess, but instead I just looked washed out.

I tried experimenting with different types of makeup, but nothing worked. I got frustrated and decided to bleach it and go back to a color that suited me more.

But black is stubborn. One boxed bleach treatment didn’t manage to pull out the color completely and I was left with a weird and unappealing head of brownish orangeish hair.

I panicked. There was no way I could show my face out in public looking like that and it wasn’t a color I could dye over easily. So, I grabbed another box and started a second bleach treatment.

This time, it came out a bright and garish orange. I sighed, but at least I was making progress, right? I just needed to apply a third bleach treatment to it and then I could dye over it again. Yes, three bleach kits in one day.

I know. I was young and stupid. I don’t think I have to tell you what happened next, but here it is anyway.

With the third bleach treatment, the color finally came out. But so did everything else.

I rinsed my hair and it felt like straw. I ran my hand through it and it came out in clumps. No matter how much I rinsed and re-rinsed, more and more of it kept falling out until I had lost almost all of it.

Making the Best of Ba(l)d Situation

All that was left on my head were a few dry strands of hair. I looked like a doll after a preschooler decides to give it a haircut with safety scissors.

I had two choices. I could cry about it and be miserable. Or I could laugh at the utter ridiculousness of it all.

I chose to laugh.

I always made jokes about shaving off all my hair whenever dealing with it was frustrating. In fact, I joked about it after the second bleach treatment left me looking like I was modeling my style after a traffic cone.

I looked in the mirror and laughed until I got tears in my eyes. Then, I asked my boyfriend if he could shave the remaining hair off my head.

If nothing else came out of this, at least shaving me bald would bring us closer, right?

It took a while to get used to the feeling of being bald. My head felt so light without all that hair weighing it down. I felt like it might just float away from my body.

And it was cold. I shivered for days, even when the room was warm.

But I never really got used to the way it looked. And I especially didn’t get used to the way people looked at me. Even with a hat on, people could tell there was nothing underneath, so I expected people to be a bit weirded out by my looks. But they weren’t. Instead, they looked sympathetic, and they were also very, very kind to me.

It took me a while to realize it’s because they thought I had cancer.

That got real awkward real fast. So, I decided to buy a wig - not a super colorful one, just some basic brown hair.

Wigs are uncomfortable as hell! It was hot AF and constantly itchy. At least, the moderately priced one I could find locally was.

So, I did my best to cover up the fact that I had gone bald. My grandmother made that hard, though. She got a photo of me at my baldest and thought it was so funny she displayed it in her living room.

Hair Is a Big Deal for Me

Thankfully, the damage I did to my scalp wasn’t permanent. The hair grew back and I’ve never let it be shorter than shoulder length since.

I still color my hair, but I’m super careful about it now. I don’t overdo it anymore and I stay away from boxed bleach treatments.

I recently decided to pull some purple out of my hair so I could put down a new shade. It took me weeks to get it all out, but I was patient this time. I went about my life with funny-looking half-done hair in varying shades. It looked like a goddamn mess, but it was still hair and I wasn’t going to risk losing that again.

I wish I could end this with an uplifting message. I wish I could say that I discovered bald is beautiful and that my hair doesn’t define me. But I didn’t.

Plenty of women look amazing after shaving their heads. But losing my hair didn’t make me feel cool or confident. It made me feel like I was wearing a bald cap and the real me was hiding underneath it.

I tried to embrace my baldness while it lasted, but I just couldn’t. It didn’t fit the image I had of myself.

My eight-year-old self was right. The real me has brightly colored hair.

So, I guess if I learned one thing from all this, it’s that my hair isn’t just hair. I always felt like I was supposed to think it’s not important - that there was something vain about caring too much about my hair. I learned to say “Oh, it’s just hair, it will grow back” whenever a haircut turns disastrous. I learned to see women who spend too much time primping their hair in front of the mirror as shallow.

But no matter how much I made myself think that, it just wasn’t true. Hair is important to me. It’s something that defines me, and it’s a big part of how I express who I am. That’s the lesson I learned from losing all of it.

That, and that I should never fuck around with black hair dye.