©Frank Bauer
©Frank Bauer
I was 14 years old when I started dying my hair for the first time. Bleaching, to be more precise. All through my childhood my hair had been a light blond but in puberty the blond gradually faded into the sort of mouse colour that nobody likes. I wore it short so I didn’t even give it the chance to get lighter in summer, it was cut off before it could become a cool surfer blond. So I reached out for the chemicals. And was hooked ever since. The excitement of ‘how will it turn out this time?’, the risk of a total nightmare, the challenge of still trying to live with it. 45 minutes of smelly mud in your hair became my bi-monthly high. I became more daring over the years, tried my luck again and again to reach the perfect tone of platinum blonde for a long time, never succeeded, was always left with a more or less orange-yellowish result. I learnt to live with it (money was too tight for a professional bleach) until I decided to become a copper beech, leave the blond headquarter and dive into darker realms. The results were more reliable, I felt more sophisticated, male responses were less enthusiastic. (Funny, I got more compliments wearing my worst urine yellow blond than with any of my beautiful darker shades. But that is another topic that we will discuss another time. )
I am back to blond now, with a bleached white streak in the front part that I added a few years back when I got tired of natural looking hair and discovered the first bunch of grey hair right in this area. ‘I will not only accept, I will embrace and enhance it’ was probably my motivation, who knows, maybe I just needed a change or I was tired of people not recognizing me. Whatever reasons I had, a little bit of Cruella de Vil never hurts, so I grabbed the cheapest ++++ extra strong bleach that the drugstore offered and felt that thrill again the moment it landed on my front hair. Never regretted it. It’s still not platinum blond, it damages my hair, but it makes me feel good every time I use. ‘So sad’ you might think ‘is that the right way to boost your self-esteem?’ Not sad at all, I reply, it is daring, rebellious, non-conformist! What starts with a streak of your hair, might help the world finally understand who you want to be. Especially if you are 14 years old and do an enviable perfectly copper beech ombré all by yourself, for the first time, including bleaching and overdying (and you are probably not even fully aware that it’s permanent).That is a big step and that is showing the world something, even if you still don’t know what it is. Welcome to my world.

Olivia wears a cap by Eckö, leggings by lucy, a fleece jacket by Review, a rain slicker by Puma, striped T-shirt from a fleamarket and hiking boots by Meindl.

SEE ALL PREVIOUS POSTS ABOUT OLIVIA AND HER SISTER ELENI….
(thank you, dear Frank, for shooting those beautiful pictures)

©Frank Bauer
©Frank Bauer
©Frank Bauer
©Frank Bauer
©Frank Bauer
©Frank Bauer

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