My best accessory -- and why I should be BALD.

Girls are known for accessorizing. Shoes. Purses. Jewelry. You could say cars are even accessories these days. I'll admit I love a great pair of shoes and would do questionable (but legal) things to get that perfect handbag but I just don't have the finances to support a full-blown obsession with accessories.

I do have something though, and I'll go ahead & toot my own horn by saying I think my hair is easily my best accessory. Even without the crazy red dye job, it's always been 'healthy' and envy-inspiring. I've never gone to a salon for a cut or color without hearing something about it from the stylist and one gal jokingly threatened to cut it off and make herself a wig.

At least I think she was joking because imaging some woman out there, somewhere, wearing a wig made out of my hair is just creepy...

I've had it long; I've had it short. I've dyed it. I've gone 'au naturale' and ditched dyes altogether. My hair is naturally quite wavy and I can get some pretty wicked curls out of it that I wish I had discovered years before I did but I usually torture the shit out of it with a flat iron and go straight. I've done blunt bangs, no bangs, juice-can bangs and the side-swept-emo bang that is my current style.

Now that it's somewhere between magenta and fire-engine red, it's definitely the first thing people see or notice about me and it's nothing if not attention-grabbing. This color is easily my favorite thing about my hair and the worst form of abuse I could inflict upon it at the same time. I use a permanent color made specifically for dark hair by Loreal, versus bleaching and using a semi-permanent, but it's really not much better.

The color uses 40 volume developer which I'm pretty sure is the same strength used when you perm. It's the highest level developer and burns like Dante's Inferno once its on your scalp. The burning sensation during application, the sensitivity for days after and the sudden 'dandruff' lead me to think I might be giving myself a good ol' chemical burn every time I "freshen up" my color.

There is no beauty without pain, or so they say, and I'm not planning to change my hair any time soon because with hair this awesome, I don't need designer shoes or the latest rage in handbags I've got all the "accessory" I need built right in; I'll take a little "fall-out" & some flaking and consider it a reasonably fair trade for hair that makes me feel like a rock star.