The New Rules for Blondes (7 page)

Since bronzing lotions have grown into a multimillion-dollar industry (and yes, I feel like I am something of veteran of the bronzer world), every cosmetics company has gotten in on the action, with most offering three bronzer options: a fair/light bronzer, a medium bronzer, and a dark bronzer. Don’t bother with the fair/light option unless you are allergic to the sun, as I mentioned before, though I must ask why you are still reading this chapter, little sun allergy buddy—I already asked you to skip to the next chapter. Move along! The fair/light rarely produces enough tan to justify the expense, so jump into the deep(er) end with either medium or dark. Remember, you can always cut it with lotion to lighten the bronzer hue.

If you start using a bronzing lotion or gel regularly, you will definitely want to be exfoliating your skin regularly, too. Bronzer can build up in weird places and you need to slough off old, bronzed skin cells to have a clean palette for the next application. Also, after you apply your bronzer-lotion combo to your face or body, don’t forget to wash your hands right away. Lindsay Lohan forgot this crucial step once upon a time, and the paparazzi were all over her orange hands. Don’t be that girl—scrub your hands right away and be sure to focus on cuticles so that you don’t end up with creepy orange nail beds. If you are putting bronzer on your body (arms, legs), be careful not to end up looking like a tan girl wearing white gloves—I told you that bronzer application was a tricky science! After you have applied tanning cream to your arms, you should wash your hands, then go back to your plain lotion and squeeze a bit into your hand. Rub your hands together and rub the lotion into the top of your hands, blending from wrist onto hand. This way, your tan arm will blend into your more white hand and you won’t have a distinct boundary showing the edge of the washed hand (the “white glove” look). Rub any additional plain lotion along the soft underside of your arms, where nobody gets tan anyway.

The final step in looking like a tan blonde (despite being a natural blonde who can scarcely tan) is thoughtful clothing selection. Wearing a white bikini on the beach can be a hot look because it makes you appear quite tan, relative to the bikini. The careful use of white need not stop there, though: In the summertime, I’ve been known to rock a white bikini, white jeans, and white purse. While rocking this look, I’ve been told that I look like an extra from a Warrant video, so brace yourself to deal with some haters who can’t handle your hotness. And screw the haters—you look
dope
!

Keep the light clothes in mind when selecting outfits for work or socializing—white attire can beautifully showcase your tan, however subtle that tan may be. But ladies, I must make a request: Please stop wearing clothing that exactly matches your flesh tone in color. When viewed from afar, too much flesh tone gives the look of complete, sexless nudity, like that weird 1980s TV show with the exposed-organ-and-skin-suit guy, Slim Goodbody (minus the organs—at least those break up the uniformity!). This “ball of pasty flesh” phenomenon occurs mostly on white women—you often see fair-skinned celebrities on the red carpet wearing delicate dresses that match their skin tone, as if a new Pantone called Eastern European Heritage Plus Vitamin Deficiency were created just for that dress. This trend isn’t doing anyone any favors, and every time I see a white lady on the red carpet wearing a getup that Steven Cojocaru calls “petal pink” or “flesh tone” or “beige,” I want to vomit.
33
Same with darker-complexioned women—when they wear a color that’s quite different from their skin tone (say, a bright pink or yellow), it really pops, but when they stick too close to their flesh tone, the entire look becomes too uniform.

A final step that isn’t required, but is encouraged, is to maximize whiteness of your white features—eyes and teeth. This is done using the stoner’s favorite tool, Visine eye drops, and the beauty queen’s favorite tool, Crest Whitestrips. Yes, this might seem a bit overboard, but achieving the illusion of a sick tan has a lot in common with fundraising for Heifer International: Every little bit helps. Making your teeth and eyes extra white will make your skin, by contrast, seem more tan, and the wheel of pasty shame and self-hatred keeps on turning and turning and turning.
34

Props must be given to celebrities who are fair-skinned and wear their pastiness with pride. I really admire Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, Nicole Kidman, Gwen Stefani, and Cynthia Nixon for their willingness to buck the trend and not worship the sun—they are stronger women than I. My bronzer addiction isn’t quite as rampant as it used to be in my teenage years, but it still persists. And so I have developed the previously described rituals for “getting color” in the summertime.

Let’s review your “getting color” checklist:

• SPF 8
  
• Beach chair
  
• Us Weekly
  (or
  In Touch
  or
  People
  )
  
• Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee
  
• A free afternoon
  
• Bronzing lotion
  
• White bikini or white purse or white pants
  
• Eye drops and Whitestrips
  

I’ve accepted that I’ll never be a slow-motion-jogging Los Angeles County lifeguard who is bronzed to perfection. But with the help of SPF 8, hours of beachside activities, L’Oréal Sublime Bronze, and white clothing, I just might be mistaken for someone who can tan naturally and who dyes her hair blonde.

CHAPTER 7

RULE:
Know How to Work the Weave

A
t some point in their lives, 75 percent of American women color their hair, whether at home or in the salon.
35
Around 20 percent of women are born blonde, but as they age, their hair is likely to turn darker. This means that plenty of natural blondes fall within the 75 percent of American women who color their hair, as blonde highlights are a common request in salons across the country. So coloring and highlights are a big part of blonde culture, even for natural blondes.

Perhaps you wish to join that posse of women who get a boost from a box of Clairol or a colorist but you aren’t quite sure of the correct name for the style that you’re seeking. What’s the difference between highlights and lowlights? Where does brassy end and ashy begin? If you have red undertones, should you be careful of certain potential problems in going blonde? If there is one thing I have learned in my experiences with blonde dye and resultant color catastrophes, it’s that one needs to know the jargon of hair color change. Along with knowing the lingo, it can’t hurt to bring a few photos to the hair salon—hues that you like, colors that you don’t like. Just as my mother advised earlier, don’t feel silly bringing along pictures of celebrities, friends, family, or yourself in earlier eras to show the colorist, especially if you’re popping the cherry with a new colorist. Would you rather feel silly for five minutes before the dye hits your head or feel that horrific pit-in-stomach anxiety as you choke back tears upon realizing that the colorist has given you purple hair?

Hair color is a mad science that combines many variables: your underlying pigment (your natural or “virgin” hair color), the color that you are seeking, the porosity of your hair (how well your hair will absorb and hold color based on how damaged your hair is), the level of developer used (this is what opens up the cuticle and activates the color), the color itself, and the length of time that both the color and the developer are left on your head. After all of those issues are accounted for and calculated, sometimes you
still
“can’t get there from here.”

To whip up this layman’s guide to going lighter, I met brilliant NYC-based colorist and friend Michael Robinson with the Antonio Prieto Salon. Michael is a gorgeous blonde lady, despite the fact that she shares a first name with my brown-haired father. Most important, Michael is a talented and friendly colorist, so she didn’t mind answering my multitude of ridiculous hair questions. She gave me a crash course in color and taught me that hair color might seem like a nebulous world filled with buzzwords such as “champagne,” “ashy,” and, “hot roots,” but it’s actually grounded in empirical logic: numbers and the color wheel. I hadn’t thought about a color wheel since sixth-grade art class and I have a severe aversion to math,
36
so I threw myself at Michael’s feet and begged for enlightenment . . . and a root touch-up while we talked.

The hair color industry organizes natural hair shades on a continuum that goes from 1 to 10. The 1 ranking signifies dark black, usually Asian hair, and 10 is the lightest color that can occur in nature (think Scandinavian blonde beauties). Of course bright blonde is a “Perfect Ten,” natch. All natural hair colors can be found somewhere in this range of ten.

When thinking about this ten-pronged color continuum, something struck me. “Wouldn’t a Marilyn Monroe platinum blonde be more of a 10 than a random Scandinavian blonde? That is, isn’t an almost-white blonde considered blonder than a yellowish blonde?”

“Oh no, that platinum, almost-white color that you see on some celebrities—that is outside the 1-to-10 scale. It’s considered a 12, and those women are called Special Blondes,” Michael explained as she gave me autumnal highlights. She reminded me that the 1-to-10 range is for purely
natural
hair colors. That 1940s-style white blonde is certainly not a shade that occurs in nature, thus its categorization off the scale as Special Blondes or Special 12. This shade is the ashiest that you can go—it’s practically white. Modern-day examples of this include Gwen Stefani, Elisha Cuthbert, Christina Aguilera, and Michelle Williams.

“So if the range is 1 to 10, and you have Special Blondes that are 12, then what color is at 11? A blonde that is really light, but not quite ‘Special Blonde,’ but blonder than a natural blonde?” I inquired.

“There’s really no 11 on the official scale. Sure, you could make a color that I suppose is considered an 11, but it’s just not recognized in the system.” Huh. So this one
doesn’t
go to 11, unlike Spinal Tap’s amplifiers.
37

Special Blonde or 12 coloring often requires a double process, when the hair must be completely bleached to the scalp to remove all pigment. Oftentimes that process must be administered twice to achieve that platinum hue, thus the moniker “double process.” A single process is half of a double process (fun with fractions!), and it’s a way of achieving the wanted hair color with only one step. When a single process is done, all of the hair is painted with one solid color so the hair color becomes uniform and every piece of hair receives color. It’s mostly used with women who have red hair or dark hair, or are doing gray coverage. Technically, a single process can be done at home or in the salon, but the at-home application of one color all over is what I tend to think of when I think of single process. A double process, which is much more complex and dangerous, should not be done at home. Beware the double process because you might end up with a “chemical cut,” which is what happens when hair is so damaged and overprocessed that it simply breaks off because of the trauma. Sounds horrifying, huh? You go into the salon for some exciting color on your beautiful, long mane, and you emerge looking like G.I. Jane or buzz-cut-breakdown-era Britney Spears. I’ve definitely seen a few gals with chemical cuts, but I thought they just had exotic taste and fancied themselves Halle Berry look-alikes who could pull off such an unforgiving look. Turns out my assumption was incorrect and they were just trying to get some color, but things went way wrong.

But back at the natural color scale, let’s explore an example. Say you have a woman who is a natural 3 (medium-brown hair) who wants to try her hand at blondeness (try her
head
at blondeness, really) and is shooting to end up at an 8. If she’s smart, she’ll make that type of drastic jump at the salon and put her hair in the hands of a trained professional. In my estimation, 99 percent of at-home, brown-to-blonde coloring sessions result in orange hair. Remember Brenda Walsh’s orange dome from
Beverly Hills, 90210
? At least that was a realistic portrayal of what can happen. That’s more than I can say for
The Smurfs
. When Gargamel first “created” Smurfette (creepy?), she had black hair. It wasn’t until Papa Smurf stayed up all night making her into a real Smurf that Smurfette become blonde. Apparently, in the Smurf world, “stayed up all night” means “executed a feat of hair color change that can never be done anywhere outside of the drawing room at Hanna-Barbera Productions.” Don’t follow the lead of Papa Smurf and attempt to change black hair to blonde both at home and overnight. Put yourself in the trained hands of a professional: a colorist. Colorists are trained in assessing the underlying pigments of your hair; knowing what can and cannot be accomplished with peroxide, glaze, and timing; and memorizing which color combinations create other colors. They must regularly refer back to the color wheel and the range of 1 to 10 in which they are constantly creating colors.

Another piece of hair color jargon that indicates less-than-desirable results is “hot roots.” The label “hot roots” sounds more like a reality TV show in which successful supermodels return to their humble hometowns, but it’s actually used to describe the phenomenon of the root part of the hair strand becoming brighter and more vibrant in color than the rest of the hair. Your head naturally emits heat, and when hair color is applied to the full strand, the section that is closest to your hot dome will sometimes absorb color more quickly that the rest of the shaft. This is why colorists usually pile all your hair atop your head and stick you under a heater after they apply color—so all of the hair is evenly heated and thus develops uniformly and you don’t get hot roots.

I asked Michael about the two types of blondes: ashy and brassy. She told me that the industry standard is to refer to these as “cool” and “warm,” respectively. “Cool” (or what I still like to call “ashy” because I’m like Sinatra and I’ll do it my way, thank you very much) is synonymous with champagne- or platinum-blonde hair. One also might hear descriptors such as “soft beige,” “soft silver,” and “lilac champagne” to describe levels of cool blonde. Michael has heard this referred to as “Upper East Side blonde,” and it’s naturally found on white people with fair skin and light-blue, gray-blue, gray-green, or blue-gray eyes, who sunburn easily and look best in silver (instead of gold). The natural hair colors that are considered cool include blue-black, dark brown, medium ash, ashy blonde, and light brown. Regardless of what color they have naturally, women who want cool blonde hair are oftentimes a bit older and from the Upper East Side of Manhattan or somewhere equally WASPy. Older blondes who regularly get cool highlights can stumble into purple quite easily because they are adding ashy tones to gray or white hair. When hair is gray, there is no pigment, so colors can end up being very bold because the hair is a pigment-less vessel of display. Check back to your handy chart in Chapter 1 for reference.

“Warm” (or what I call “brassy”) is the golden California blonde that is quite popular in Texas and Los Angeles. “Honey caramel,” “butter pecan,” and “bronze” are adjectives often used to describe a warmer blonde tone. A warm blonde occurs naturally in people with a golden or yellow undertone to their skin and green, hazel, brown, or amber eyes; whose hair is naturally red, brown, strawberry blonde, or golden brown; who can tan easily; and who look better in gold than silver.

We’ve talked plenty about going blonde, and any colorist will tell you that it’s always safer to go lighter. Highlights are an easy, low-commitment, and flattering way to play with hair color. The request that gives pause to most colorists is when a blonde client comes into the salon and asks to be made a brunette. “That’s when you get into the emotional needs of the client,” Michael explained. Every colorist with a few years of experience has witnessed a client have a blonde-to-brunette freak-out. As I did back in 2000 when I followed the lead of Cameron Diaz (circa January 2000 when she went bold brown for a minute) and became an almost black-haired lady (more on this dark period in my life can be found in Chapter 10). I forced my mother’s beloved colorist to make me a dark, severe brunette, and I regretted it within forty-eight hours.
38
Make no mistake: Blonde to brunette is a major adjustment. Every fall and winter when I would mention lowlights and toy with the idea of going light brunette for a bit, my old colorist Reinaldo would just nod, smile, and mix more caramel-hued dye for my highlights. He knew that I’d ultimately hate darker hair, and he was right.

Michael went on: “When a client comes in asking to go darker, you spend a while talking them out of it. You walk them through every step: what you’ll do to take them to brunette, then what you’ll have to do to correct it or undo it. The time, the process, the potential for doing a color removal (which just completely strips the hair of applied color)—it’s a lot to take on. And even if they push-push-push and insist that they want to go brunette for a change, most of them freak out and want it undone within a few weeks.”

There are plenty of hair color phenomena that are more quotidian than hot roots, chemical cuts, and dramatic color changes. You’re probably familiar with a partial foil, which is when highlights are applied using tin foil to isolate the pieces. This is done over half of the head—usually just the crown to the ears. A full foil is the same thing across the entire head. Other options when it comes to foils are T-section (when foils are applied in a T formation on the head—the top and sides receive foil packets) and Starburst (which isn’t an overrated, waxy candy but rather when five to seven packets of foils are applied on the top of the head). Highlights are streaks used to subtly lighten you color, and in contrast, lowlights are streaks that darken your color. The same method of application is used for highlights and lowlights, though—small sections of hair are painted, then wrapped in foil to isolate. A solid or uniform color is one that doesn’t have highlights or lowlights—it’s very monotone in hue. This is what lots of Special Blondes are: Their hair is entirely one uniform shade, and there aren’t other colors woven in for depth.

Michael’s training and expertise has given us a strong base for what to expect in the salon with hair color. But what about at-home tricks and tips? This is where my lifelong hair obsession finally comes in handy. Throughout my childhood and teenager years, I engaged in a lot of trial by fire with hair color, assorted hair products, and hairstyles. Finally I can feel like the ugliness of those years (and years) of perms was not in vain. I can share my lessons with you, dear reader.

Personally, I have fine hair, as do many natural blondes. Just look at the three daughters in
The Brady Bunch
—all had very fine, occasionally limp hair. How do you care for hair like that, living in this crazy world of shampoo and conditioner? I’ll tell you the key for fine-haired ladies: Don’t overcondition. Conditioner is alluring and silky, and it calls to us, just like it does to Adam Sandler in 1995’s
Billy Madison
. “Conditioner is better. I leave the hair silky and smooth.” Conditioner can be great (especially during dry winter months), but it should be used sparingly and only on the ends of the hair—away from the roots. I recommend shampooing your hair like a normal person (using a color-protecting shampoo or a purple shampoo, as necessary), then putting conditioner just on the ends (
not
the roots) and letting it sit there while you shave your legs or belt out a few power ballads in the shower. Then rinse. As you are brushing through your damp hair post-shower, if you are having trouble getting the brush through, feel free to spray some leave-in conditioner onto the middle and ends of the hair (again, away from the roots). If the opposite occurs and your hair feels overconditioned and floppy (like the hair of Janice the hippie chick in the Muppet band), simply brush through it and compensate for that silkiness with extra quantities of products that will give you back some body: gel, mousse, or hair spray.