For the past four years, I have contemplated dying my hair a fashion color, but I would always talk myself out of it. I was convinced that the bleach damage wouldn’t be worth it, or I was starting high school and I didn’t want to stand out. The time never felt right. But on Tuesday, September 15, I hopped into my car and drove forty minutes to a hair salon to get my hair dyed emerald green. After waking up the next morning and hating it, I started regretting all of my decisions. Why did I choose this color? What if people stared at me? Would my hair ever recover from the bleach? After getting over the initial shock, and a few hours of gawking at myself in the mirror, I fell in love with it. 

The number one thing that was holding me back from dying my hair was my fear that I would hate how I looked. I could go on and on about how this was related to the unattainable goals of women’s beauty set by society, but it was mostly my own insecurities holding me back. I have always hated change for as long as I can remember, whether it be painting a room a different color or discarding old clothes and keepsakes. I feared the same would be true with my hair. I was terrified that I would hate this drastic change to my appearance. 

After almost two weeks of having dyed hair, I can confidently say the opposite is true. I can’t imagine it any other way. The amount of confidence that this simple act has given me is astronomical. It’s a positive side effect I was not expecting, but I’ll happily accept. That’s not to say that people telling me I’ve ruined my hair, or that I was so pretty before won’t affect me a little. It’s just that I don’t care about their opinions as much anymore. I also won’t be seeing anyone anyway, being inside all day. In the midst of this terrifying and life altering pandemic, dying my hair has given me a purely positive experience, something that is getting harder and harder to come by nowadays. If your major reservation to dying your hair is the judgement of others, now is the perfect time to do it. 

One of my other major reservations to dying my hair was the bleach. I’d seen countless videos on YouTube of girls ruining their hair to the point of no return. After years of confusion and experimenting with products, I finally understood how to make my wavy hair look good for the first time in my life. Was I willing to risk the damage in order to achieve the color of my dreams? The morning after I got my hair dyed, it felt Sahara Desert dry, but after thirty minutes of deep conditioning, it felt almost one hundred percent back to its normal texture. My waves were basically the same, though a little more poofy than before. And if you take the plunge and your initial hatred doesn’t go away, you can always dye it back to your natural color, or wait a month for it to wash out. But if worse comes to worse, you can always wear a hat.