(Photo: Raylene Knutson)
This summer I went on a date with a 22-year-old. Before you judge me, please note that I was living in Montreal at the time, a city that is lousy with 22-year-olds. On the date, the 22-year-old explained that there are four kinds of women in the world: women that are cute, women that are pretty, women that are beautiful, and women that are hot.
“Like, a cute girl is y’know, like cute, okay? But she can upgrade to being pretty or whatever if she has a good personality.”
Okay, I said, like a Zooey Deschanel.
“Yeah! And like a hot girl, she’s a girl that you just want to do stuff to.”
Sure, like a Kim Kardashian.
“Yeah, you don’t like necessarily, want to date her or anything, but you would. A guy would date a hot girl, even though she’s not beautiful.”
Great, I said, but what was I?
“I would say that you are pretty, but it’s confusing. Because you have glasses, but then this like, really slutty hair. So it’s cool ‘cuz it makes guys wonder, like, what’s that all about?”
I was blonde in Montreal, a brassy blonde with dark roots like a depressed waitress deep into her Madonna phase. My hair had deviated from a tawny medium-length bob (I believe in the industry term is “lob”), as straight and glossy as Anna Wintour’s, back into its natural state, a frizzy maelstrom of despair not unlike the coifs of 1980s heavy metal bassists. I was celibate, but my hair was a living signification process for sex. On my head it felt like I was wearing a trash bag flailing in the wind.
Hair colour seems trivial, but no other part of appearance is as rooted in cultural psychosis. Nobody wonders why blondes have more fun; the hair colour is its own kind of manifest destiny. When Diana Vreeland told Harper’s Bazaar readers to wash a blonde child’s hair in dead champagne, as the French do, it was ridiculous – but then, so is being naturally blonde.
I came out of the womb with feverish blue eyes and a jet black Mohawk, the kind of hair that the Katy Perries of the world go through several single processes to obtain. When I was a kid it was thick, straight and shiny, an asset when my mom attempted to kickstart my childhood acting career. By the time puberty had bequeathed me Maltese fishing village hips and oversensitive skin, it had turned into a greasy, fly-away mess. In college I discovered Godard and bangs and wore it in a long sheath – the Feist, or the Jane Birkin, with split ends. With my gigantic horn-rimmed glasses, you wouldn’t even see a face. I was glasses and hair, a butt and maybe a pair of boobs, virtually obscured from the world.
When I wanted to dye my hair in middle school, my mom urged me towards the semi-permanents for fear that I would hate it and dunk my head in our pool in frustration, refusing to get out for dinner. (This had happened in Grade 5, when I attempted Gwyneth Paltrow’s pageboy cut in Sliding Doors, and again in Grade 7 when I wanted Drew Barrymore’s baby bangs.) The smiling Nutrisse models wearing “dark amber” or “honeyed espresso” turned my hair the same menopausal maroon every time.
Blondes were icy, blondes were Hitchcockian, blondes could throw drinks in their suitor’s faces and still get diamonds by the end of the movie. I was tired of idolizing brunettes, stodgy yet sweet wonder girls with delicate, Natalie Portman-like features. I wanted to be free and easy, classy and slutty all at the same time. Men loved a blonde for her contradictions and a brunette for her “sophistication,” a.k.a. staid boringness. I avoid Audrey Hepburn fangirls like the plague. Beautiful doomed Marilyn got away with so much more.
When my hairdresser Mischaela at Yorkville’s Earth Salon (she is the Carl Sagan of colourists, y’all) made me over with Julie Christie’s coif in Shampoo in mind, I learned the sad cultural truth of blondness, which is simply that women will be bitchier to you and men will be nicer, and neither of them will know why, probably. I have my blonde moments, but as an actual blonde, I felt like no one had ever expected less of me. I went to my temp job as an office assistant for a 3D Quebecois karate movie two hours late and photocopied the call sheets upside down. “You’ve got to try a little harder to do things right,” said the brunette female AD. “Chandler is the greatest person here,” said the male key grip.
At first I felt like I was playing a role, but weeks later, the bleach had gone to my head. I started to identify with other blondes on the street as if they were my kin, and hoped they considered me a threat. I pumped my head full of John Frieda blonding shampoo and public pool chlorine, turning my mane lighter and lighter. Yet this blonde appearance wasn’t computing with the expectations I had for my blonde life. If I was supposed to be having more fun, then why was I so miserable?
The essence of beauty is letting the world see you as you see yourself. Women spend thousands of dollars each year hoping for that one perfect haircut, the one that will transform them into the person they’ve always wanted to become. I wanted to become blonde, but the dye job hadn’t gotten me any more action or diamonds (I don’t actually want the diamonds), and I wasn’t getting away with much more. I wasn’t suddenly icy-cool and confident, I was terrified of being alone. If you have to rely on the opinions of 22-year-olds to determine whether you’re cute, pretty, beautiful or hot, no amount of highlights will ever be enough.
When I got home from Montreal, the first thing I did was book a hair appointment. I wanted Mischaela to take me back to black, to reality, to my roots. For Halloween, I went as Bettie Page, a brunette pinup famous for her dalliances in S&M. To cope with the anxiety of wearing my first revealing costume ever, I ate a quarter cap of mushrooms and walked through Kensington Market in fishnets and wedge heels, trying to feel my own face.
Would I ever be beautiful? Was I even high? I guess it didn’t matter. I was a brunette again, stumbling through the market alone on Halloween, trying on myself again to see what fit.
Chandler Levack is a Toronto writer who just turned 25, so what is she even talking about with this “don’t judge me I dated a 22-year-old” shit?
