Never On Sunday

Eileene tried her mother’s hand at hair dying yesterday, hoping to save the cost of a professional without significant loss of results. (It came out fine.) The dye job is decidedly not natural; it’s a vivid blue. And it looks great. I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t find it appealing. Admittedly, people who don’t like it might be keeping mum out of politeness, and the blue hair would probably be less popular were Eileene also to go in for a radical hair sytle as well as color, but I like it and she likes it and a lot of other people like it. A grand success.

The success is particularly worthy of celebration because Eileene has worried for as long as I’ve known her and probably longer that she isn’t interesting enough on her own, that she needs to look exotic in order to hold people’s attention. That’s nonsense, of course; she has a forceful personality and easy enthusiasm that is impossible to ignore as long as she hasn’t decided she’s not sufficiently interested in you to bother. Between a shaky self-image and a confessedly poor sense of fashion/design/color, she seeks… odd fashions over pretty ones. She’s dawn to “conversation-starter” jewelry over attractive jewelry, t-shirts with cunning decals over t-shirts that flatter her figure, awkward, poofy skirts that make a statement—whatever statement that may be—over skirts that let you know she’s got nice legs. She’s even fooled with “loli” fashions a bit, a Japanese fashion that seeks to emulate toy dolls in overblown Victorian fashion, though never with sufficient commitment to pull it off. Which is just as well. Many Americans, myself included, find loli creepy. The odd-but-not-particularly-pretty effect is often compounded by a taste for browns and blacks other drab colors, the subconscious sabotage that most of us share, telling us we can’t get away with more daring colors and cuts, even when we can. “I want to be daring! Well, more daring than I have been. Oh, maybe not that daring. How about brown? Brown is safe.”

Blue is not safe. It is decidedly daring, and decidedly a conversation starter. I’ve been present for several strangers asking about her hair. But it’s also proven quite pretty. I look forward to a future in which anime-colored hair is not only acceptable, but common.