the highlighted fantastic

I am getting uncomfortably close to age 30. Not that there's anything wrong with being 30; it's just that I had some major ground to cover before I looked the part.

During my externship, I cleaned out my closet. Every day I'd pull out something old, wear it to the courthouse, and gauge my 23-year-old fellow extern's impression of how frowzy and outdated I really looked. Most often, the clothes went straight into the Goodwill bag as soon as I arrived home.

Now I'm restocking the nearly-empty closet with dark suits worthy of a female lawyer in her early thirties, and I even invested in a small jar of nighttime goop to unpuff the bags beneath my eyes. More cosmetics are in the wings, too, which shouldn't surprise anyone except the people who've always known how much I hated wearing them.

But this is what happens when you realize you're pushing 30: it's time for a makeover.

For the past year my hair has been straight, dark, stringy, and very long. (And graying, too, which would periodically be corrected by an application of drugstore dye.) I had much of it chopped off a few weeks ago, but it still remained straight, dark, stringy, and otherwise unremarkable.

I needed some Queer Eye for the Married Chick, but aside from Patrick's advice on opaque tights, none was forthcoming.

So this afternoon I moseyed into Karen's favorite salon, equipped with a Visa card and all the bravery I could muster. This would be my first major change in hairstyle since high school. "Make me look like a lawyer," I told the stylist, gulping at the lump in my throat.

Two and a half hours and $200 (*yolp*) later, I guess I do. My hair is basically shoulder length, but layered to fall in a halo around my face. And it's streaked with red. "I'm making the highlights very subtle," the stylist told me as she painted ammonia on my hair and rolled it up in slivers of aluminum foil.

"Erm, I'm not a fan of red highlights," confessed my husband when asked his opinion of my new 'do. I refrained from sharing the price tag with him.

I think I'm a fan of them, although I'm not sure if this look is something I'd ever see in a magazine and say must have it. Then again, that's the entire point here; I needed a makeover precisely because I was no longer capable of reinventing my own image. My requirements for a hairdo were almost pathetic: "It needs to be lawyerly, but long enough that I can pull it back in a ponytail at the gym." And that was about it.

I tried to take a picture of the highlights to send to my mother in Florida, but they wouldn't come out on my digital camera, which leads me to believe that they're every bit as subtle as the stylist represented. So it looks like I'll be showing up to Oh See Eye gray-free, lawyerly, and looking my age.

And I've concluded that that is, in fact, a good thing.

thus spake /jca @ August 28, 2003 08:02 PM