A Love/Hate Letter to my blonde hair

Why this natural brunette keeps returning to her artificial (blonde) roots

It makes you feel pretty until it doesn’t. Men’s eyes linger as you peruse the aisles of Sainsbury’s.

It lowers your intelligence but screams you have a fun, bubbly personality. It looks luscious, creamy and inviting in some lights and somehow straw-like in others.

Going blonde isn’t a decision to rush into, hairdressers warn - discussing it with the same gravity as marriage or a mortgage.

But as if it were a bad relationship I’ve invested too much time in, I can’t stop crawling back to my fake hair colour.

Like countless others, I had no option but to get clean from my addiction in lockdown - and was pleasantly surprised by how easily a comb glides through mousy brown hair when it isn’t being bleached into oblivion.

As the dull brunette tones took over my crown and the over-processed yellow graduated to the ends, I figured I’d look like a tortured Sally Rooney heroine by the end of it all.

Or Jane Birkin when she first moved to Paris in the 60s.

But when all the blonde had finally gone, I looked in the mirror and felt like - to use that deeply misogynistic term - a “plain Jane”.

In a world entrapped by the male gaze, I had made myself invisible.

Complimentary coffees from Pret baristas, I learnt, were reserved for the blonde protagonist of this story - not the subdued sidekick who tried to step into her shoes.

White vans stopped beeping when I paused at traffic lights. Jokes about how my then-boyfriend was ‘punching’ became more infrequent.

I hated how much time I spent questioning if men still found me attractive. But still, I dug my heels in, resisting the urge to buy a box dye.

Going brunette was my own personal feminist statement - even if it affected no one but myself.

But all that changed three months before my wedding day.

After whisking me away to Bath for my hen do, my bridesmaids lovingly littered the rented Georgian townhouse with pictures of my husband and I from over the years.

I studied the 20-year-old version of myself, with her easy confidence and highlights funded by an interest-free student overdraft, and felt a pang of longing that didn’t subside until I’d booked a hair colour appointment.

In other words, I caved. I was so obsessed with looking like the ‘best version’ of myself at our wedding, I didn’t stop to consider that maybe I was already there.

Almost two years have passed since then and I can confirm blondes, or at least this one, definitely walk through the world with more eyes on them.

But do I feel better about myself for returning to my artificial roots? Not really.

In fact, I can’t stop reminiscing about how easy it once was to brush my undyed, virgin hair, which now ties itself up in angry yellow knots every time I move my head.

You know what they say, sometimes the grass really is greener on the other side.

Now I marvel at how I ever thought my brown hair, which is so luscious in its ordinariness, ever stole my sparkle.