Robyn Pennacchia's "A Series of Unfortunate Hair Styles"

So... I totally need to get my hair cut- I have a bad habit of putting it off until the last minute. But I was thinking today about the various retarded phases my hair has been through.

1. I swear to god, when I was like, 3, my mom brought in a picture of Scout from the movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird, and told the stylist - This! This is what I want! And thus, I looked like this:


Almost exactly, actually.

2. And then I had that hairdo, but with sausage bangs. Sweet!

3. Then, my sister came along. And my sister, unlike me, had pretty pretty princess hair. Long, blondish hair, with perfect little ringlets that formed at the bottom. Totally not fair. I demanded I be allowed to grow my hair long.

4. And it was long. For a ridiculously long time. But I did not have pretty pretty princess hair like my sister. I had hair like this:



5. Around 6th grade I started getting all experimental and shit. The first real damage I ever did, personally, to my own head, involved, of course, Sun-In. And a day spent by my friend and I devoted entirely to dousing our heads with the awful crap, blowdrying it, and doing it again. Over and over again. It didn't work wonders, of course- we both had super dark brown hair- it only got slightly lighter. But then, we figured, in all our genius, that if we each used a whole bottle on just our bangs- we could get them pretty bleached. And it worked! We looked completely retarded, but it worked.

6. But it got better! Oh, it did! It truly did! Because then we discovered food dye! Yup, food dye! We dyed our sun-in bleached bangs blue and red and green with food dye, and my, wasn't that attractive! Then we tried koolaid- which of course only lasted like, 5 days and made my hair smell like raspberries, but not in any kind of good way. Also- kinda sticky.

7. 8th grade was my first foray into the world of permanent (read: not food dye or kool-aid). A bottle of "Purple Haze" Manic Panic purchased from Newbury Comix. Which destroyed my bathroom (to my mother's dismay) and didn't really show up so much in my almost black hair. Still, I thought I was totally bad ass. The use of Manic Panic continued perpetually, and unattractively through my teenage years.

8. When I was about 16, my hair was probably down to my ass- and, really- not so cute looking. However, for whatever imaginable reason, I thought it might be swell to chop it all off. Like, all of it. It looked so terrible that I couldn't bring myself to cut it again for quite some time, and when I let it grow out, I had this hideous Indigo Girls mullet- well before the fashion mullet ever existed.

9. When I was about to turn 22, I came to the realization that this was the last time I could dye my hair bright pink and not look, you know... sad. So I did it. I bleached my hair out, and dyed it pink for the last time. Oh, by the way, you know how you kinda have to wait for a bit before you dye hair after bleaching it? Yeah, well, in case you never guessed it- I look horrifying with blonde hair. Horrifying. I scare children and animals. Oh, and despite my plan to not look sad, I kinda did- because I just wasn't that person anymore. Still, glad I got it out of my system.

Since then, my hair has primarily been either burgundy, or as close to my own shade of almost-black-brown as I can find in bottle (yeah, the red keeps showing up, so I have to dye my hair until it finally all grows back in. I am fine with that. And I keep it at a reasonable length, and really, my only major mistake is going too long without bothering to get it cut. Which I'm totally not going to do this time.