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I am by no means a frivolous, feminine woman. I’m the kind of person who’s too cheap to get pedicures every week, so I get them every two months instead. My notion of the perfect shopping trip is 2,000 pesos and a morning at 168. It takes me ten minutes tops to prettify myself for a night out in town; twenty minutes if I have to take a shower before that. Heavy makeup for me is black liquid liner applied thickly on my upper eyelid.

So what compelled me to shell out a ridiculous amount of money and spend a ridiculous amount of time to get my hair color changed yesterday?*

Beats me.

Well okay, ever since I got hired by a company that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about how their employees look, I’ve been itching to dye my bangs bright red again. I announced the idea to my parents, only for me to change my mind when I saw them exchange horrified looks that said, “Her toilet-training went smoothly when she was two. Dear God, what have we done to produce such a freak?” So red bangs was out of the question. I was, however, really itching to do something new about my appearance so I decided to try a color combination that was outlandish yet relatively normal–ash blonde streaks on black hair.

I went to the Salon de Manila branch at Katipunan extension for my hair dying project. My mom had her hair colored at the Makati branch sometime last year and though their rates are pricier than other salons, I liked how her hair turned out. The streaks were very fine and distinct; you could tell that the colorist knew which strands of hair should be colored and which ones shouldn’t to create the most flattering look.

The original plan was just ash blonde streaks, but somehow the colorist sales-talked me into adding red streaks to create a more “confused” look. Confused is good, so I accepted her suggestion and let her do her magic.

What I thought would take at most two hours turned out to be a three-and-a-half hour ordeal. Getting most of my hair wrapped in foil took maybe an hour, and then I had to wait around half an hour for the bleach to eat out the color from my hair. By the second hour I was already squirming like an overactive toddler during Sunday mass. After what seemed like centuries, the dye was ready for rinsing but the rinsing process took ages to finish too. Once they got the foil out, they rubbed in some awful chemical that made my scalp sting and it had to stay there for maybe ten minutes.

When the shampooing and rinsing was finally done, I had to have my hair treated with more chemicals so it doesn’t turn out to be frizzy and dry. I’d forgotten the exact reason as to why I needed to have all these oils and chemicals rubbed into my hair, but by the third hour I didn’t really care anymore. I just wanted to see what my freaking hair looked like, and I wanted to go home and eat dinner.

At long sweet last, the torturous ordeal of the hair-dying process was finally over. But I couldn’t go home yet because I needed to get my hair trimmed, which ate up another thirty minutes. Seriously. The entire time I kept wondering how the hell can women sit still and spend so much time in the salon. And it made me wonder if I were any less of a woman because if I had known that getting my hair done would take this long, I would’ve risked the ire of my parents and gotten the red bangs instead. That takes half an hour tops, and costs way less too.

When I finally saw the finished product though, I couldn’t believe my eyes. My hair looked amazing. There’s a lot more blonde than I would have liked, but the colors somehow worked well with the new cut and my skin tone (I kicked the guys at work for telling me I now look like Tina Turner). While I don’t think I’ll ever do another three-hour hair-dying session again, it was definitely worth the eternity spent sitting on my ass, waiting for the peroxide to bleach out the black.

Time spent: 3 and a half hours
Total spent: a little over 5 thousand pesos
Cost of looking good: priceless

* Actually, I didn’t pay to get my hair done. I was drastically low on funds, so I made pretty eyes at my mom and asked her to help me out here. I owe her a day at the salon once I get my first paycheck though.