by Estela Dela Fuente

Created on: April 16, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

How Does a Hispanic Explain Orange Hair?

I'm Hispanic and definitely look like it. I have olive skin, dark eyes and dark eyebrows, and when I was in college I had really dark, almost black hair. For reasons known only to geneticists, there are a lot of redheads on my mother's side of the family. My mom had dark hair and coloring like mine, but her grandmother was described as having flaming red hair at a time when hair color was unknown. One of my aunts was a freckle-faced redhead, and her children's hair ranged from titian to strawberry. Anyway, when I was a freshman in college and finally away from my mother's strictures against dyeing my hair, I decided that perhaps it might be fun to be a redhead. So I purchased a henna rinse and applied it, not daring to leave it on as long as the package directed because I didn't want the change to be too dramatic. Well, when I rinsed it out, there was absolutely no change in my hair color; at least, no change that I could see unless I focused a halogen lamp on it, and then you could see a vague reddish tint. But the halogen lamp was hot and not practical to carry around, so I figured that if I wanted more noticeable results, I would have to use a dye, rather than a rinse.

By then it was about 8 p.m. on a Friday night, but that's early for a college student used to pulling all-nighters, so my roommate and I traipsed to a nearby drugstore where I purchased both a permanent hair dye and a home permanent kit. This was in the 60's in Texas, where "big hair" has always reigned supreme. Mine was shoulder length, and I envisioned a large mass of tumbling red curls. We decided that it would be best to do the perm first, so the two of us spent the next hour rolling my straight black hair onto those teeny-teeninesy plastic curlers that come with a perm kit. Do they even make home perms any more, I wonder, or have lawyers for home perm disaster victims succeeded in getting them taken off the market?

Once the curlers were saturated with the vile rotten-egg smelling solution, we waited for 15 minutes, the prescribed time for the curling process. The kit directed that the still-rolled hair be thoroughly rinsed in warm water so as to stop the curling process, and then a neutralizer solution was to be applied and gently worked into the hair as the rollers were removed. The neutralizer somehow "locked" the curl into the hair so that it stayed curly until it grew out. Another waiting period, another rinse, and finally the perm was complete.

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>