Austerity and Hair Color

I am trying to live on a budget. Tough economic times, single mom, part-time fitness trainer, enough said.

But I still need to look good (and somewhat young!) for this great dating life that I keep conjuring in my imagination and for my clients, all of whom I’m trying to convince that Pilates is, indeed, the ticket to eternal youth.

So in an effort to be more frugal AND to cover up the grays in a timely manner, I purchased a $9.99 product from Rite Aid called Pro Root Touch-Up by Marc Anthony.

It took me a week and a glass of wine to muster up the courage to “Just twist, shake & apply!” Marc Anthony makes it sound so easy on the box. It’s the directions inside the box that are very evasive…“Let color stay on hair for 15 to 35 minutes.”

Note to Marc Anthony: When it comes to messing with your hair color, twenty minutes is a very large window of time! I could be leaving the house tomorrow in a hat, frantically dialing any salon in Sacramento that might happen to be open on a Sunday and lamenting the fact that I left the color on for twenty minutes or even ten minutes past my hair’s natural threshold for absorbing new color.

Oh, and did I mention that they only make “Pro Root Touch-Up” in the category of Permanent hair color?

I decided to let the color sit on my hair for 22 minutes. This amount of time seemed to be a nice, happy medium.

Twenty-three minutes later, I had my head in the kitchen sink. Twenty-five minutes later, I was blow-drying.

And you know what? My hair looked pretty good. There were definitely some spots that I overlooked but application #2 on Sunday night, for 35 minutes this time, pretty much wiped out all the remnants of pre-mature graying and brought me back to my "30-something" image.

I think I’m sold. At least until next month... when my glamorous dating life is really in full swing and when my clients all decide that my services are worth much, much more than what they’ve been paying.

And by then, maybe I’ll even have the eyebrow waxing mastered!

At the top of this post is a (overexposed) picture of the “Pro Root Touch-Up” kit. That’s my thumbprint on the box. It’s really not a tidy process.