Dark Hair, Auburn Hair, Repeat
For the last decade or so, my hair has lived on a gentle seesaw between two colours. Natural dark, moody and grounding, or a warm light auburn that makes me feel like I’ve got somewhere to be even when I’m just going to Coles. I don’t do wild swings anymore. I don’t wake up and decide I’m a platinum blonde girl now. It’s just these two, back and forth, like an old married couple who still fancy each other*.
The thing is, I genuinely vibe with both. I’ve got the makeup down pat for each one – the auburn era wants a warmer blush and a softer brow, the dark hair era wants something a bit more precise, a bit more done. I’m not chasing a colour because I hate myself in the mirror. I’m choosing a colour because I know exactly what it does for me, and that’s a very different energy.
But here’s what nobody tells you when you’re standing in the salon chair deciding between the two. This isn’t just a style choice. It’s not vanity, and it’s not boredom. Changing your hair colour will change how the world responds to you, and once you notice it, you cannot unnotice it.
*Ok, there was a wild affair a couple of times with blonde. I regret nothing.
Yes, Science Actually Backs This Up
I know how it sounds when someone says “the science proves it,” like I’m about to link you a dodgy blog with a stock photo of a brain. But this one’s real. Studies on hair colour and perception have shown, again and again, that people form snap judgements based on hair colour before you’ve said a single word. Warmer tones read as approachable. Darker tones read as more serious, more composed. None of it is about who you actually are – it’s about the story your hair is telling before you open your mouth.
That’s not fair, and it’s not supposed to be. Humans are lazy pattern matchers, and hair colour is one of the fastest patterns going. It happens in the first few seconds, before your personality, your humour, or your genuinely excellent taste in earrings gets a look in. Annoying? Yes. Useful information? Also yes.
Because if people are going to judge you on sight regardless, you might as well decide what they’re judging. That’s not shallow. That’s just understanding the game you’re already playing, and playing it on purpose instead of by accident.
Hair Remembers Everything, So Cut It Off
Here’s the bit that sounds a little witchy but is genuinely true. Hair holds memory. Not in some crystal-adjacent, moon-phase way, though I do love a bit of that too, but in a real, physical sense. The strands that were on your head during the worst month of your life were literally there. They grew while you cried in the car park. They were there for the group texts you wish you could unsend.
So when a relationship ends, and I mean really ends, the kind that leaves a mark on your nervous system, cut it off. Not necessarily a dramatic pixie crop sobbed through at midnight, though no judgement if that’s your ritual. Even a solid trim, a few inches gone, is a physical act of removing what was attached to you during that chapter. It’s not superstition. It’s just refusing to carry dead weight around on your own head, quite literally.
Lulu doesn’t understand any of this, obviously. He just sits on the bathroom counter judging me with his little demon eyes while I’m mid-chop, like he personally disapproves of my hairdressing skills. But even he seems to sense when something’s shifted in the house. New hair, new energy, and one deeply unimpressed cat watching it happen.
If You’re Doing This Yourself, Protect the Damn Hair
Now, a practical interlude, because I refuse to let you fry your ends chasing a vibe shift. If you’re colouring at home, and plenty of us are given how expensive a salon visit has become, use a bond plex treatment. Colorplex, Olaplex, whatever’s in your budget, but use something. Colour, especially if you’re lifting your natural shade, breaks the bonds in your hair whether you like it or not.
Skipping the bond plex step to save ten bucks is how you end up with hair that feels like straw and behaves like it too. You want the auburn without the damage. You want the transformation without spending the next six months in a deep conditioning hostage situation. It’s one extra step, and it’s the difference between hair that moves and hair that just sits there, defeated.
This isn’t me being precious about product. This is me having learned the hard way, more than once, that vibes are not a substitute for hair science. Do the treatment. Your future self, and your hairdresser, will thank you.
Nobody Gets a Vote But You
Here’s the part I actually love talking about, more than the science and more than the bond plex lecture. Your hair is one of the very few things in life that is entirely, completely, non-negotiably yours to decide. Not your partner’s opinion. Not your mother’s raised eyebrow at Christmas lunch. Not some ex who once said he preferred you as a brunette, as if his preferences were ever the point. Yours.
There’s a specific kind of confidence that comes from sitting in the chair and choosing on purpose, rather than drifting into whatever colour you’ve always had because changing it feels like too much admin. When you walk out with the exact shade you pictured, something shifts in your posture. You’re not hoping people like it. You already like it, and that’s the whole engine right there. Nobody can talk you out of a decision you made for yourself, with your own two eyes in the mirror, for no one but you.
That’s the real gift underneath all of this, more than the science, more than the manifesting. It’s the reminder that you get to author your own image. You get to decide what era you’re in and what colour that era wears. No committee, no group chat vote, no permission slip required. You choose it, you own it, and you walk out of that salon like you already know something everyone else is about to find out.
This Isn’t a Crash Out, It’s a Strategy
I once had a job where I was not popular. Not in a dramatic, mean girls way, just in that quiet, overlooked way where you say something in a meeting and it lands with all the impact of a wet napkin. I was tired of it, and honestly a bit tired of myself, so I went auburn. Nothing else changed. Same job, same desk, same me underneath it all.
Within weeks, people were different. Warmer, chattier, more likely to actually look at me when I spoke. Even my boss, who barely registered my existence before, started commenting that people seemed to be getting on better with me. I hadn’t changed a single thing about my personality. I’d changed my hair, and the room recalibrated around it.
So when people roll their eyes at a big colour change and call it a crash out, I’d push back on that, gently but firmly. Changing your hair isn’t a breakdown. It’s one of the most practical, low cost ways to manifest a different version of your life, because it changes how people meet you before you’ve even said hello. Go auburn. Go dark. Go Blonde. Go Pink. Go however feels true to the era you’re trying to build. Just know that when you sit in that chair, you’re not being dramatic, babe. You’re being strategic.
We Need to Stop Clapping for Basic Decency – Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity
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