The story of my hair

People who have known me for years know that my hair changes often. I've had it straight (my natural style) and curly. I've been a blond, a redhead, a brunette. I've had it long, I've had it short. Today's blog is all about the journey to pre-chemo hair.

I don't have digital pics from the blond or curly days but here are a few that shows you how often I've changed it:


Feb 2004

Apr 2004

Oct 2004

Jun 2005

Nov 2010

Jun 2011

So now, we're in the midst of this breast cancer journey. As I posted in an earlier blog, my 22-year-old son and I had made a bet that I wasn't going to have to chemo. The stakes were pink hair. I lost. Below are the 4 steps I went through from my "normal" style (the last one above).

To start, you have to realize that I'd kept postponing getting a trim because "chemo was just around the corner". So this first shot is really badly grown out. I don't want anyone thinking that my hairdresser actually left it looking like this.


So the first step was to get it cut short. That has nothing to do with dying it pink but I've been advised a few times that it's easier if your hair is short when it falls out. It's easier on the drains, it's easier to clean off the pillow, and it's not so obvious. More more important, apparently your skin (i.e. your scalp) can get really tender and when your hair is long, it pulls more so short hair doesn't hurt as much. I can agree to almost anything that mean less pain!
Okay, so now I had short brown hair. The funny thing is ... I liked it. I never used to like my hair short. But I think I'm going to keep it short in the future. Go figure.


To go from short brown hair to short pink hair, there's an interim step. I had to bleach my hair as light as I could get it. One thing I now know, though - white-blond hair is NOT my best look. What you can't see in this picture is that because I've been colouring my hair for literally decades, there is very little "virgin" hair on my head. All the parts that had previously been dyed did not lighten as much as the roots. As well, the friend helping me was inexperienced with dying. So I ended up with leopard spots. Parts were white blond and parts were medium blond and a few spots where she missed saturating the bleach were still light brown. It was about a bad a "bad hair day" as I have ever had. Even with that, this pic looks a lot worse than it did in person. I'd just blown it dry with no conditioner so it's standing all up on end but since it was just for a few minutes, I didn't really care at the time.


Okay, ready? Here's the final product. It's really pink at the roots (where it was white blond) and almost orange where it was medium blond. Oh, and if you look close, you can still see the spots. Okay, maybe you don't have to look all that closely.


I'm so glad that it's all going to fall out soon. I haven't been out in public yet but I did post the pictures on Facebook (and got a lot of supportive comments, I might add),

One last point...my friend who helped me do this dyed her hair pink too. She didn't do the bleach so hers is more of a pink overlay on her salt-and-pepper hair but it looks cute.

'Ya gotta love her.