Kat's Rambling Mind

I should preface this story by mentioning that A) I was a hairdresser for about 25 years, and B) my sister is tougher than a railroad spike.

Let me tell you about my sister, Jennifer. Aside from being an amazing person, she’s about 5-1/2 years younger than me, and growing up that was just enough space for us to go through the normal big sister/little sister stuff. We shared a room as kids and that didn’t always work out; she wanted to hang out with me, but I was just old enough to have recently learned to roll my eyes at everything, including my baby sister.

Luckily, as we got a little older, we spent more time together and became closer. We were pretty much almost complete opposites, though. I was the wild child party girl, and Jennifer was the conservative, responsible one. She was a very reserved high schooler, while I was a novice hairdresser who never met a cosmetic she didn’t like and knew just enough to be dangerous.

However, my sis wasn’t so conservative that she didn’t want to get the bright blonde hair that was the hallmark of the 1980s. Perms were also the order of the day, because in case you were too young to be there, hair in the ’80s was blonde and curly and BIG. So, I permed and cut and highlighted my sister’s hair with glee, and she let me.

After I had been a hairdresser for about 2 years at a smaller salon in Gainesville, I got a job at a very trendy salon at Gwinnett Place Mall in Duluth, Georgia, which was located in the north Atlanta suburbs. Gwinnett County was booming at that time, and while it wasn’t Atlanta proper, it was considered by the folks in my hometown to be “close enough”. Very tony, very la-di-da, indeed!

And so it came to be that in the fall of 1987, my sister came down to that salon for me to work on her hair. She had decided she wanted something different than blonde; she wanted her hair to be red, or more precisely, auburn. However, since I didn’t quite feel confident in my ability to transform my sister’s platinum highlights to deep titian tresses, I consulted with the hair color apprentice at my new place of employment, and she chose a shade. She assured Sis it would be perfect.

And so, I applied the color to Jennifer’s hair. I watched the color as it was processing, and it appeared to be getting darker and darker….and didn’t look red at all, quite frankly. I expressed my concern to the apprentice, who promptly told me to trust the process. I didn’t have a good feeling about things, but I decided to wait and see.

When it was finally time to remove the color, I apparently couldn’t hide my nervousness as I shampooed Jennifer’s hair. She kept asking me how it looked, and I kept saying, “Let’s get it dry first”. As she looked in the mirror with a look of abject horror on her face, I quickly started to dry her hair in the hopes that it would look better as it dried.

Nope. It was flat jet black. And my sister was NOT happy.

The apprentice was mystified as to why my sister didn’t love it. “Because it’s not even remotely what she asked for!”, I blurted out.

“Let’s go outside and look at it in the natural light”, said the color girl. I was starting to see why she might be an apprentice, I thought to myself.

We trudged outside to the parking lot and looked at the color in the blinding August sun. That turned out to be a mistake, because as the sun hit it, it just looked blacker. I felt horrible, because my sister looked so forlornly unhappy. However, she was stoic about the entire incident, and decided to just leave it alone, lest her hair melt off her head entirely.

But this mistake would turn out to be the gift that kept on giving, because the more my sister shampooed her hair, the more the black began to fade, until she called me one day and said, “My. Hair. Is. PURPLE!”

Panicking, I tried to sound calm as I asked, “How purple?”

“Welch’s Grape Juice glowing PURPLE, that’s how purple!”, she said.

Oh yikes, I thought. Mama and Daddy had been mad enough that Jenny’s hair was unnaturally black, but to have it turn purple … they were liable to disown me, right after they skinned me alive!

Now what you have to remember is that while purple hair wasn’t exactly rare in the ’80s, it was downright unheard of at White County High School in the tiny hamlet of Cleveland, GA. I offered to consult with other colorists at the salon in order for her to get it toned down, but ultimately the decision was made to leave it alone in the hopes that it would continue to fade as time passed.

I wondered how my sensitive, shy, sometimes self-conscious sister was doing at school with this drastically different look; I was hoping she was faring okay. She told me she was. That’s one thing about my Sis–she’ll face things directly. I felt like she was being teased at least a little though, because high schoolers are not always known for their subtlety and tact, and Jennifer loathed anything that drew attention to herself.

As the purple began to wash out, the color eventually faded and became lighter, and finally ended up exactly how she wanted it, which was the color of a copper penny. I was thrilled she was pleased with it. She wanted to keep it that color, and the next time I didn’t doubt myself; I matched up the color myself, did a test strand, and it came out fine. She wore red hair for years after that.

Years later, Sis confided in me that at first, she was miserable with the black hair; it didn’t suit her complexion, plus it was just so different. She also said that even though she did take some ribbing over the look, some of her friends considered her to be a little “punk rock” after that, because she drastically changed her appearance and then totally owned it. She joked that it may have inadvertently helped her reputation!

And so, from that incident I learned to genuinely admire Jennifer as a person who meets a tough challenge head-on, and I also learned to trust my gut more in matters of my chosen profession. I like to think Sis learned that being a little wild was okay (but maybe not purple hair wild), and we both learned that what could have driven a wedge between us ultimately made the bond between sisters stronger. After all, our shared love of hairspray is still one of the things that keep us close to this day!