I was reading a story on Huffington Post today and found myself utterly amused and amazed at how much I agreed and disagreed with this woman who wrote the story. Link below
Redhead Article on Huffington Post
As I was reading I found myself agreeing with her about things, but it wasn’t what you would think. I totally agreed with her when she wrote about how crazy redheads are and there is a love’em/hate’em mentality. Couldn’t agree more!
Now being a natural redhead myself I have often found myself being prejudice against redheads too, they are nuts, weird and frankly those redheads with the curly hair, yuck, not to mention those with the carrot-top color hair, blech. Yes, I am prejudice against my own ‘kind’! Sick isn’t it. Although, I can totally relate to many of the redheaded issues growing up. I was called everything growing up and it didn’t help that I looked like Anthony Michael Hall in the movie Sixteen Candles, or that I was 5′7 and weighed less than 90 pounds, it didn’t help I had absolutely no self-esteem, grew up in a single parent home and was an only child, didn’t help that my mother dressed me like a boy and thought I looked cute in short hair!
Yes, I was super ugly, insecure, and gross growing up and thankfully I don’t have many pictures to prove it. I was called all the names, including the infamous name Paris Hilton called Lindsey Lohan and yet, when Paris did it, I laughed SO hard! Hey, usually for redheads, the rug matches the curtains….it is fact.
But unlike this woman who wrote this story, I DID dye my hair in 8th grade over my spring break, I bleached it blond. Because let’s face it, Sun In was super popular in the mid-80’s and maybe I could have gone to Hawaii over spring break, used a lot of sun-in and came back to school a week later with blond hair; hey, it could happen! Now, in my case, I didn’t go anywhere and my ‘blond’ hair came from a box of bleach. I was laughed at even harder when school started back again, but I didn’t care, they finally weren’t laughing at me for being a redhead or calling me all the names redheads are called anymore so, it was awesome!
I kept the blond/strawberry blond hair all the way through high school and into college. Then, when I started dyeing my hair back to my ‘natural’ color red (notice the word, “dyeing”) all of a sudden I found myself with a new power of sorts. I became a hair model for a top salon in the Twin Cities, with one of their top stylists, I found myself having a new found confidence in my red hair and I still got a lot of attention for it, but this time, it was good attention, the kind every 20-something single girl wants. There was intrigue in my red hair, and well some of the same crazyness too.
I learned quickly 2 things about men, once they date a redhead, they will do one of two things: 1) they will NEVER date another redhead as long as they live or 2) they will ONLY date redheads from now on. Fact. In my case, most of them will never date another redhead again, I find a certain sick joy in that. 🙂
Now as I get older and gasp, closer to 40 each day, I relish in my red hairdness and am bummed that my days of being a redhead are certainly coming to an end sooner than I would want them too. Thankfully, my gray is still manageable and I am able to just pull them out, but I know that day when pulling them out, will only make me bald, is coming sooner than I would like. I also think it is funny that I find myself insulted and upset when my children tell me I have brown hair and I try (unsuccessfully) to tell them, I have redhair, not brown hair! Ew, the horror of having brown hair!
Yes, being a redhead has certainly been a challenge at times, but I take those childhood playground beatings, teasings, ruthless ridicule and the adulthood of ex-boyfriends who truly believe all redheads are psycho with a bit of pride and with my head up knowing, how utterly boring my childhood and young adult years could have been had I just had boring ole blond or brown hair……