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For hours and hours, I cried.

The next day, I made an expensive appointment at a local upscale salon. The colorist somehow managed to give me dark brown hair with golden streaks. 6 weeks later, she got it to a medium brown with lots of golden blond. I looked beautiful! Bless her. I swore off home hair color for life.

That is, until I cut my hair short. I had grown it out to past my shoulders, and decided to go for an adorable Meg Ryan cut. All of the damaged hair was gone, and I was left with sleek, shiny, normal brown hair. It was so dark. I wasn't used to having my normal hair color anymore, and I made a rash decision to go back to blonde.

The next few highlighting escapades are unremarkable. But once my hair was so blond that I was starting to look like Marilyn Monroe and Meg Ryan's lovechild, I decided I wanted to go back to something closer to my natural color.

I booked an appointment for a cut and color, and made sure the colorist understood what I wanted. Oh, did I say colorist? Oops. Turns out she wasn't a colorist. She just cut hair. But she'd decided to just "wing it" (her words, not mine) and color my hair. After all, she'd watched her colleagues do it over and over; what could go wrong?

I, blissfully unaware of this, let her start coloring my hair. I wanted light brown (I knew I couldn't go much darker than that) and I said I didn't mind if some of the golden blonde was still showing through. The stylist said she had to put a filler in my hair.

After the filler was washed out, my hair was orange. Think of an actual orange. That was the color of my hair, I kid you not. With dread in my voice, I asked, "Is it supposed to be this color?" The stylist assured me this was just the filler and that the orange would in no way show through the color she was about to put on my hair.

20 minutes later, the color was washed out and I was in tears. My hair was a color that to this day remains damn near indescribable. I'll try to bring it to mind. It was purple-brown with orange undertones. It made my skin look like cheese. I refused to pay once I found out that she wasn't actually a colorist. (I found this out when the manager came over and was shocked at what had transpired.) To make matters worse, I was late for a family dinner. I didn't have time for the hair cut I badly needed, so my hair was a huge poof of overgrown purple-orange curls.

I eventually fixed it, grew my hair back out, and left it natural for a long time. Then, one day, I got the idea into my head that I would look really, really cool with cotton-candy pink hair. Not just streaks. I wanted my whole head to look like a My Little Pony mane. I decided this would be simple to achieve. Bought some bleach, bought the pink dye, and went to town.

Surprise, surprise. The bleach turned my hair yellow and orange. I decided to dump the pink in on top of the whole mess, hoping it would just cover it up. Somehow.

Oh, it didn't. It didn't at all. While I sobbed in the tub, my boyfriend made me sign a contract (literally, a paper contract) that I wouldn't ever try to color my hair by myself again. Then I went back to an expensive salon for a $200 corrective color that turned my hair chocolate brown.

That was 2 years ago. I've left it alone until today. It was a fine color, but all the years of dying and growing have left it a little uneven. Nothing too noticeable, but I wanted a slight change. You'd think I would have learned, but I'm an addict. And addicts just can't say no.

If you haven't colored your hair before and you're thinking about taking the plunge, I beg you to reconsider. At the very least, go to a salon. If you pay $8 for hair dye, you're going to end up with $8 hair. Trust me.

Learn more about this author, Molly Cathryn Glover.
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