I remember in my younger days when getting your hair frosted was all the rage.
I never understood why frosting was any better than going grey, I never frosted my hair.
Both of my nieces are natural blonds. They get blond highlights and it looks nice. Then the younger niece started getting her hair dyed black so she could add blond highlights. Or maybe she just had all but the top dyed black? Seemed like a waste to me but whatever. Now she’s gone brunette because her SO likes brunette better than blond.
I can deal with the pink hair, red hair, even blue and purple hair. It’s fun, it’s sassy, if you are the kind who can carry it off.
But now I see advertisements for UNBRE.
This is what we used to call ‘letting your roots grow out’.
This used to be the phase we all hated. Where we would either give in and bleach our hair again, or get all the bleached hair cut off as soon as possible.
I have umbre hair in my senior class photo.
Who knew that I was in style long before it was ever considered a style?
Until last week, I only knew ombre as a type of fabric similar to batik. When I saw it describing hair, all I could think of was letting roots reall-l-l-y grow out.
I had black hair with purple to hot pink ends, From about 2004-2008. I had to touch up not only the ends, but the roots, too, because my hair’s not black. It was pretty long, so I would pull up the pink/purple ends, tie them, and wrap in plastic wrap while I touched up my black roots at home. Then I would go to the salon for the bleaching and dyeing of the colored ends. Saved me about $50 each time to do my own roots.
So, it was me. I invented it! I also got tired of scrubbing the resulting fuscia color off my shower and tub walls. Now, I’ve gone natural, growing out for the last 2 years. Turns out my real hair color is dark chestnut brown and there’s a sparkly salt sprinkle mixed in. Haven’t figured out if I like it, but it’s nice not to have to re-color every month. Plus, the cash.
And yeah, it pretty much looked like bleached and color-dyed hair I had let grow out really long, to those who didn’t know anything about hair and how faded it would be it it had really grown out like that.
I knew the spelling looked wrong and I had never seen the word used for anything but fabric.
Whenever I see the commercial I think why does anyone want to around with their roots showing.
I have enough trouble understanding what we women do to our hair.
IMHO
Mullets are a schizophrenic attempt at a compromise between looking groomed in a suit for a corporate day job and looking like a bad ass rock star on the weekend.
Neat and clean in front to please the boss, wild and crazy in back to attract the chicks.
Every time I saw a rat tail I wanted to grab a pair of scissors.
Isn’t it funny how something as trivial as hair can get some people all wound up? I remember the first appearance of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan in '64? '65? Anyway, my mother went on and on about their hair being so long!! The horrors!! :eek:
For a while, I was almost as reactionary as she was about hair, till my spousal unit pointed out that it just doesn’t matter. Shaved heads will grow out, colors will fade and eventually be cut off, odd cuts and styles can be brought back to a “norm” of sorts with a pair of scissors. And in the grand scheme of things, it’s just hair. Sometimes it looks good, sometimes it looks bad, sometimes it looks ridiculous, but it’s just hair. I don’t get nearly as aggravated as I used to, altho the most recent haircut that I paid for was flat-out bad, and I hated it till last week, when my mom fixed it.
So have a ball! Do whatever you want to do with/to your hair. Just know that somewhere, someone is likely mocking you behind your back. But if you’re the type of person who likes wild cuts and outrageous colors and unconventional styles, you probably don’t care about the tastes of the likes of me. That’s fair. At least try to keep it and yourself reasonably clean and odor-free…
I will say, I love looking at my high school yearbook - OMG - what were we thinking??? And that was just the early 70s in a very conservative suburb…
This made me smile. My late boyfriend threatened me, literally, until the day before he died that he was going to grow a rat tail. (Not if there were scissors anywhere in the house!)
Personally I used to have purple hair but I had to become a grownup…
Otherwise known as ‘The Skunk’ - white/grey in the middle & black at the sides, kinda like Pepe Le Pew.
There’s a guy at work, in his 50’s, greyish crew cut & a footlong rat tail. You don’t know the restraint I have to go thru to not cut it off when I see him in the halls. Rebelling by keeping a style that was dumb when it was in…20 years ago. :dubious:
I love ombre hair with unnatural colours, like in this pic. You call it letting your roots show, I see it more as ‘dip dye’ - as in dipping the ends in the dye. I was going to go with something like that, but then I decided on an asymmetrical cut with dark brown on top and purple underneath.
Very pretty! About ten years ago, I dyed my hair a not-found-in-nature red, and I liked the way it looked as it started to grow out. My favorite phase was when my hair was half red, half black. I never knew this style had a very official sounding name, “ombre,” but folks have had intentionally partially dyed hair for a long time. Whenever I go to the hair supply store, the weave section has hair with varying amounts of dye, starting from just near the root to just the tips. I think it looks nice when the dark portion of your hair is fairly long, otherwise it just looks like you were too lazy to get a touch up.
More talking because I took too long to edit this into my first post: There’s a difference between this (dark hair very near to the roots only) and this (long dark roots) or this (extensive dark hair, with light colored ends). The latter two to me look cute, while the first is like, dude, get a touch up already.
What’s with all the straightened hair these days? Curls look good on many women but are seldom seen in the under-70 section. Straight hair’s fine if your hair is straight naturally, but straightened hair just doesn’t look natural at all to me on certain women.
Disclosure- I’m a white male with very wavy, almost curly hair when it grows out. I spent the 70s trying to straighten it into the part-in-the-middle, feathered, razor-cut look. It took a good twenty minutes each day to do blow dry and style it. In the 80s I figured out it looked better curly and freed up a lot of time in the mornings since air-drying made it curl great. By the 90s, it fell out. Now I keep a 1/4" buzz cut since having long hair would make me look like Larry Fine Or Gallagher.
I don’t get it either. I saw an interview with Beyonce on tv the other day and couldn’t understand why she had dark roots and blonde ends and was appearing in public like that. Turns out, I’m just an old fuddy-duddy and that look is all the rage.
I see women in my neighbourhood who have decided to stop dying their hair and have let their roots grow out. It looks horrible to me and I don’t get it. Why not wait until the roots start to really show and then get a short and funky hairdo and then grow it out in the natural colour, instead of walking around for months with gray roots and fake brown/black/blonde ends?
Then again, the supposedly temporary, wash out in one month dye I used on my hair was anything but, and I ended up with weird tri colour hair between the dye, the previous henna and my natural mousy brown. It’s all evened out now because I got my hair cut short and went back to just using henna, but it was kinda ugly for a while.
I have red/auburn ombré and it doesn’t look the roots growing out, but I went with a non-super dramatic difference in shades. It’s somewhat similar to this
The hardest part for older women to grok is that hair color is no longer *meant *to look natural. I was reading an essay today about whatsername, that coined the marketing phrase for Clairol: “Does she or doesn’t she?” It points out that, in that era, it was the height of embarrassing if someone could tell you “painted” your hair. It goes on a bit about how it was the time when Ethnic women felt they weren’t All-American enough, and being a blonde Jewish woman was part and parcel of making yourself over into a “real American girl”, but no one was supposed to know that it was fake, because then they’d know you weren’t a Real American Girl. Back then, it was most definitely meant to look natural, and tongues would wag if it didn’t.
Well, we’re no longer a melting pot so much as a stew. You don’t have to look like a natural blonde, because no one judges you for being a fake blonde anymore. You can “paint” your hair, and no one who matters (that is, young people) care. Better dyes and safer home kits have given us a whole rainbow of hair colors, and young people love this shit.
And once it became almost mainstream to have pink hair, then what? How do you push the creative envelope? You push it by techniques like ombre (which is actually several years old; now that it’s available in kits, it’s passe and will be sported by housewives instead of artists and raver chicks) and color block hair color and multicolor hair color.
It’s not supposed to look like “roots”, and most of the time in professional ombre all of the hair is dyed and what you’re seeing is not, in fact, outgrowth. It’s hair that’s been dyed two different colors. On purpose. Because she doesn’t WANT it to look natural. She wants it to look beautiful and interesting and creative.
And beauty, so I’ve been told, is in the eye of the beholder.
Heck, I’ve gone so far as to buy a couple of wigs. After keeping up my coloring habit for some 25 years, I got tired of it and was curious to see what would grow out. Instead of deciding what to do with it now, I took the lazy option and tried a wig for a work-related event. So much fun! And yeah, even 10 years ago I’m not sure people would have been as complimentary about it, but now it seems even wigs are no big deal. I enjoyed it so much I bought a second one. Once people realize who I am with the wig on, we just have a fun night. For those who don’t know me,this exchange has yet to get old for me:
Them: I love your hair!
Me: Thanks, it’s a wig!
Them: jaw, floor
Me: I know, right?? ::flips hair, bats lashes::
