I’ve had raven hair my whole life. Until recently, just the thought of going from brunette to blonde made me shiver. How could someone like me, a tan-yet-pale girl of Arab and Hispanic heritage and a head of thick, nearly jet-black hair, pull off a Pamela Anderson-level blonde? And yet, about four years ago, images of myself with flaxen hair started to wheedle their way into my brain and park there. I couldn’t shake the urge to go platinum despite this reaction from just about every person I told about my plans to go bottle blonde: a horrified look on their face, followed by a rather hasty, “Why?!”
Well, I’ll tell you why: I just felt like it, a (very much free) opportunity arose, and there’s no better time than the present to try something new. Against the peanut gallery that is my group chat’s advice, I plopped into a salon chair for 10 hours and spent from morning to night going as light blonde as my colorist thought possible.
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My blonde inspiration
The idea of jumping on the blonde bandwagon had been brewing in my mind since 2021. While going down a boredom-fueled rabbit hole of Billie Eilish’s beauty transformation throughout the years, one of her early looks caught my eye: silver strands that were nearly black at the roots. I immediately turned to my roommate, showed her the photo, and said, “I could absolutely rock that,” to which she replied with a not-so-gentle, “Dear God, please don’t.”
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Since then, going lighter with my natural hair color became a pipe dream of sorts. It wasn’t until three years later, during a trip to Stockholm, that I began to take the idea of changing my hair color more seriously. In Sweden, blonde was everywhere, and the variety that fit under the bill of “blonde” (Wheat! Platinum! Bronde!) had me yearning for a bottle of hair bleach.
The person who really got me to go for it, though, was a fellow beauty writer I met during that trip. I was sharing my woes of being bored with my brunette hair at a dinner table filled with international beauty editors (humble brag) when Humeara Mohamed, a London-based beauty and fashion writer, jumped in.
She quelled my fears with her firsthand experiences of experimenting with color. She whipped out the photo evidence of her stunning journey with hair dye and bleach, including the icy-cool blonde of my dreams. Like me, she also has naturally thick, dark brown hair and a tan complexion, so this was the first time I felt like I could see myself with this color, and I was willing to go through the extensive process of getting it.
Prepping to go from brunette to blonde
I met with three different colorists, only to be immediately shut down. Their reasons ranged from time constraints to the fear of chemically searing my hair in the process. (I found that to be totally fair.) I knew going into this journey that I would have to spend hours or multiple sessions in a salon chair to lift and tone my natural pigment so that I wouldn’t end up with a brassy mess.
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