Red? Me?

Traditionally, getting my hair cut is roughly equivalent to getting a filling at the dentist: something I delay until the effect of inaction is physically painful. When I traversed to the salon yesterday morning, my hair wasn’t at a crisis point. It’s not really the type of hair that reaches a crisis point: longish, baby-thin, usually flat and occasionally flaky. At the best of times, it sits on my head with a kind of cross-legged poutiness, as though angry at me for not putting product into it.

As I brushed my hair one morning several days ago, looped it into its signature ponytail and tightened the hairband, I realised how bored I was just looking at it. As I commuted to work, I decided to change it completely; cut it short the way it used to be and dye it. Red, I thought. Red would work.

Come Saturday, the hairdresser viciously shampooed and conditioned my neglected scalp with fruity salon product and snipped my tattered locks into the requested bob. The crew was filming, so I swished out of the salon and slid on my sunglasses, running my fingers through the softened strands and leaving a trail of summer orchards in my wake.

On the walk home, I picked up a box of red hair dye and made my first attempt that night. Naturally, it didn’t go to plan. I didn’t put the plastic gloves on first and smeared my hands with permanent red dye, then forgot that my hair was shorter at the back and coated my neck as well. This resulted in a post-adolescent spit-on-handkerchief moment as my mum voraciously scrubbed my stained skin, pinning my hair gypsy-style in a patterned headscarf and muttering things like “honestly” under her breath.

Thirty minutes later and I rinsed, relishing the ghoulishly blood-red water, the slick of hair against the porcelain and feeling faintly like a Sylvia Plath poem. Scrub, blow-dry and I’m a redhead and crazily invigorated by it. Even though I’m stuck finishing a 3000-word essay on a sunny weekend, hay-feverish and coming on all flu-like, I finger the shock of strands on my head and I smile.

Anything is possible in a red bob. You can quote me.