A hair dye catastrophe

My father works on his appearance more than most men. On mornings you can find him attending to his beauty needs after a long and messy shower, in a way reminiscent of the bathroom-monopolizing teenage girl in sitcoms of yore. His preening takes so long that one needs to wait an hour or so to have a turn or find another bathroom to get ready for work in. At length, he emerges in a cloudburst of steam, spruced up and self-satisfied, leaving a confusion of toiletries and a puddly safety hazard in his wake.

This ritual continues in his retirement; in fact he uses his new found freedom to spend even longer in his self-made steam bath, only to sit down – gleaming – to his breakfast and to putter about the house for the rest of the day.

One sore point my father has about his looks is his hair, that has been turning white for as long as I can remember. In years gone by I used to offer him the consolation of calling his hair “silver, not white”, and saying he looked “distinguished, not old”. Such attempts usually fall flat now, because his hair can no longer pass for silver or “salt and pepper” as he had firmly christened it. It is, for better or worse, now a colour that puts me in the mind of my old rabbit, Snowy.

Snowy (Photo by oceandesetoiles)

It took one occasion to push my father to action about his hair. At a party, he was asked if he wasn’t so proud to have such a lovely daughter to accompanying him? Unfortunately for these well-wishers, the woman by his side was actually my (deeply amused) mother.

Soon after that episode my father came home brandishing a dubious bottle of “hair tonic” that promised to make white hair black and black hair blacker. When asked why he didn’t just find a hairdresser to give him a proper colour treatment, he snorted in derision: he wasn’t going to be fooled into spending an arm and a leg to get chemicals put on his precious mane. Oh no, he was going to go about it naturally. My father held up the bottle with a raven-haired woman on it and showed me where it said: “Herbal hair dye for strong, soft black hair”. That settled the matter.

Next morning, while I straightened my bangs in the reflection of my laptop screen, my mother and I heard a shriek from the bathroom. The door flung open and my father stalked out, aghast, shouting: “Look! Look at this!” As he stepped into the unforgiving white light of the kitchen, we saw. We tried to stifle smiles, in vain.

But my father saw no humour in this. His hair was a distinct pale yellow. “Look at what’s happened to me! Stop laughing! It’s not funny, you know,” he said scathingly. “It didn’t say anything on the bottle. . . What am I going to do now?”

As he had just had a haircut prior to the colour experiment, he could not cut the offending yellow off without enduring near baldness. The only solution was to grow his hair and de-yellow it in increments.

Two months and two haircuts later, my father still has a Dennis-the-Menace curl atop his head. The only comfort I can offer him now is to say that he reminds me of a tropical bird. His colour catastrophe has not deterred him from his morning beauty treatments, which continue with unprecedented vigor. I guess this means I’ll continue washing my face and brushing my teeth in the kitchen sink for a while yet.