Milly Gets a Make Over!

Oh, I’m a lucky, lucky girl. This is what happens when your sister-in-law (and friend) is a talented hairstylist, another good friend is like a clothing artist and gifted seamstress! My friend R made me this ADORABLE dress for my birthday (along with some PJ’s and another very cute dress).

I have never been a brunette before, though that is my natural color. I was blonde as a kid, but – there’s just no denying it – I am not blonde anymore. I have brown hair. Brown.

I’ve been in denial about this for a very long time, so it feels good to get it off my chest; it’s been kind of a secret big deal to me.

Since age 18, I have been dyeing my hair an ever-changing array of colors. Sometimes red, sometimes platinum, sometimes auburn (but only once or twice did I ever flirt with brown-ness in this way). Once It was black, and once it was blue. But never brown.

See, secretly I thought brown was boring. Plain and dull and tediously common. It’s not that I thought other people with brown hair were boring. Lots of my friends had enviously beautiful, lustrous brown hair. But mine could never be that way, because, well, it was mine.

And it was brown.

But lately, I’ve been curious to find out what’s going on under all that color. To see what my ancestors have left me. I’ve become fascinated by the idea of genetics*, the idea that each feature of my physical body is a composite of genetic material continuously transferred for who knows-how-many generations. Who gave me this brown hair? Was it the supposed Welshmen on my father’s side? The alleged Germans on my mother’s? What about my Hungarian grandfather? Was this his hair? Or is it his mother’s hair, and where did she come from? Or how about the nameless Cherokee grandmother hovering somewhere in the eastern region of my family history? I am made from bits and pieces of these people, they have made my existence possible, yet have lost their names to time. I’d at least like to know something about what they looked like.

So, I got my sister-in-law to color my hair as close as she could to it’s natural color (she had my roots to work with). It may be a little darker than my natural color, but I don’t really know. Only time will tell.

And if it turns out that the ancestors left me a raw deal, I’ll just keep coloring. But so far, I love it. Everything I thought about being brunette was so, so wrong.

* not in a creepy eugenics kind of way