Dressing Down

Dressing Down
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 29, 2014

I thought I’d arrived early, but to my dismay I was unfashionably late. A warehouse frock sale waits for no woman. The hall opened at 9. It was now 20 past and the building was heaving with bargain hunters.

I’m normally a prudent shopper, but my commonsense turns to compulsiveness when my favourite brand is discounted by 70-percent. I paused in the doorway to absorb the arresting sight of a hundred women on a shopping assault. A flock of twenty-somethings swooped past me and descended on a table of $20 jeans like seagulls on fish ‘n chips. I scampered over to join them.

A gaggle of trendy mothers, trailing their toddlers, kept up a running commentary as they rifled through a rack of embroidered shirts. “It doesn’t matter if we buy the same one,” called one. “Just ring me before you wear it!” Beside me, two middle-aged women were grousing about the lack of bigger sizes.

Finishing up at the jeans table, I elbowed through the throng and squeezed in beside a leggy exotic-looking woman who was sifting through a rack crammed with silky tops and dresses. In the presence of such lithesome beauty, I felt like a pelican in the company of a flamingo. “Swap?” she said.

I looked at her blankly.

“Swap?” she repeated with a hint of annoyance. I realised she was impatient to exchange places so she could examine the rest of the rack. Feeling stupid, I feigned nonchalance as we side-stepped around each other. She resumed her intense inspection of price tags.

I bent down to pick up a crumpled cream smock, which had slipped from its hanger. I held the dainty thing against me: could it fit?

“Are you going to try that?” said the flamingo, eyeing off my prize.

“I’m not sure. Is it a shirt or a dress?”

“On you, a dress.”

“Oh,” I replied, defeated. “My mini-dress days are over. You try it.”

“Thanks,” she said and added it to the collection of hangers already dangling from a slender hand.

After ten minutes, I’d exhausted my search but a peach-coloured cardigan, some grey jeans and a pastel top were showing promise. I picked my way towards the makeshift changeroom at the back of the hall.

Communal dressing rooms unnerve me. This one had a crude curtain barely shielding us from public view. I staked my claim to a square foot of floorboards, and attempted to undress gracefully. Strangers, stripped to bras and knickers, fussed with zips and buttons.

No-one made eye contact. I tried to avert my gaze from the nudity on parade but short of shutting my eyes, it was impossible. Hopping to remove the pair of cheap but too-tight jeans, I reflected on our different bodies: the taut tummy to my left, the pot-bellied one in front, the one now puckered from pregnancy. I sucked mine in and tried on the cardigan.

Knickered bottoms ranged from scrawny to wobbly, ample to pert. I compared my despised muscly calves with the slender legs attached to the girl beside me. None of us said a word as we wriggled into shirts and dresses and tops and pants. Some fitted. Some felt like tourniquets.

I reached for the pastel top. Lifting my arms, I slipped it over my head. Half way down it jammed around my forehead. I tried to ease the fabric past my ears, but it refused to dilate. Blindsided, I clumsily felt around the neck-hole to locate the button I’d missed. There wasn’t one. Squirming to free myself, I hoisted the shirt off my head and flushed with embarrassment.

“I can’t get my head through the hole!” I wailed.

The girl with the ballerina legs snorted. And with that, we dishevelled women dropped our guard and began to chat.

“Give it to me!” said a petite lady to my right. She looped the shirt over her head where it stuck fast across her eyebrows. I leaned over and helped her tug it free.

“Thank goodness it’s not just me!” I said.

“Nope,” she replied. “I must have a fat head too!”

“How ridiculous!” said the tall woman in the corner as we passed the offending shirt around for inspection. “Now our heads are too big for fashion?!”

“What do you think?” asked the leggy girl. Trying on a lacy dress, she was analysing her reflection in the mirror.

“I’m not sure about this bit,” I said truthfully, pointing to where the fabric billowed around her narrow hips.

“I’m built like a boy!” she moaned, twisting to frown at her rear view. And right there, I realised few women are ever happy with what they’ve got.

But the peach-coloured cardigan made me feel good. It was a steal at 40-bucks. I bought it as compensation for my giant head.

Taking it on the chin

Taking it on the chin
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday July 20, 2013

It’s lucky beards don’t hold grudges because I make damning generalisations about their owners. Shifty weak-chinned buggers they are. I like to know where the beard ends and the man begins. Why the wearers of crumb-catchers always stroke their whiskers while thinking about what they’re hiding behind.

I’ve had some bad run-ins with beards. It started in the 70’s with Catweazle, the TV wizard. I watched every episode from behind a bean bag, revelling in being scared witless. I don’t know if it was Catweazle’s ratty goatee, the crazed look in his eyes or that toad he kept in the pocket of his filthy brown cloak, but that warlock did some lasting damage. Beards gave me the heebie-jeebies.

I turned the corner in Year 6. My teacher Mr Pearsall had an Abraham Lincoln beard, bushy but neatly clipped and a vibrant shade of orange. In the afternoons, he sat on a stool reading to us from a book called Stranger from the Depths, a gripping novel about a bunch of kids who befriend an underwater alien. As he spoke, his beard would catch the sunlight streaming in through the windows of our demountable classroom. His face aglow, Mr Pearsall and his incandescent beard were mesmerising. That book came to life in the hands of a man who might well have been an alien himself.

I never quite understood the appeal of the beard; why 98-percent of the world’s lumberjacks, sea captains and bikies are so attached to their woolly faces. But then I met Gordon.

Gordon and his wife live not far from us. Their Jack Russell and my 3-year old like a morning constitutional so we always stop to chat. I’m fascinated by Gordon’s wispy white beard, the way it fans out from his chin then tapers to a point halfway down his chest.

Even the slightest breeze lifts the delicate ends of his beard and they float up around his face. Abstractedly, he gently strokes them down: “Fifty years I’ve had it now,” he tells me, “Grew it at 30. Every day I comb it, shampoo it once a week. I used to plait it to keep it out of the way, or roll it up and pin it with a clip under my chin, but I’m a fading hippie now so it can fly free.”

His wife shrugs: “I still don’t like it” and Gordon roars with laughter. I suggest he might like to reacquaint himself with the bottom half of his face just to keep the missus happy. He gives his beard a pat and replies: “Nope, too late. It’s part of me.”

My razor-sharp spouse likes to grow a beard on holidays. He calls it a beard but really it’s just ginger scraggle. After two weeks it’s like a badly mown lawn – tufts growing east on one cheek, south on the other, a prickly clump on his chin sporting a smear of dried toothpaste.

But that scruff of whiskers has a strange effect on him. Newly hirsute, he fancies himself as Chuck Norris. I play along and declare him the most macho bloke. And then the bearded one kisses me like he’s Lone Wolf McQuade and days later I’m still applying ointment to my gravel rash.

This season’s footballers aren’t doing facial hair any favours either. Those bushrangers just make the game more untidy. I say leave the chin curtains where they belong, boys: in the 70’s – on singers like Kenny Rogers and Barry Gibb.

But certain beards have the ability to stop traffic. Only yesterday, catching up with two pals at a coffee shop, one girlfriend exclaimed “Hey! Check out that beard!” We all turned to look outside and there was an old gent with a giant Father Christmas beard, white and bushy with an elaborate moustache that curled up at the ends, giving the illusion of a permanent smile.

On older men, the beard can add a veneer of gravitas, on younger men, a rugged virility. Or villainy: Fu Manchu’s evil moustache became the template for Disney scoundrels and Hollywood’s bad guys. 

Whatever the fashion, I say Brad Pitt’s untamed goatee looks one park bench away from deranged. George Clooney’s salt and pepper version gives him the kind of retrosexual manliness my mum fancies.

These days, facial hair needs lessons in etiquette. A beard is too big if you can wring it out, or it joins up with the hair on your chest. A beard must not be used as a bib for eating garlic prawns. When two beards cross paths, the bigger one gets right of way.

None of this matters in our house. Yesterday morning, as Mr 7 o’clock shadow lathered up, I commiserated that the beard-growing season doesn’t start until Christmas: “Never mind,” I said “you look just as rugged without one.” “That’s nice, Blossom, because I haven’t had a close shave in years. Maybe you could find me a razor that hasn’t shaved the beard off your legs.”

Pay your moody dues

Pay your moody dues
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday March 30, 2013

Apparently PMS doesn’t exist. Any woman claiming a monthly permit to grumpiness, gloominess and general wretchedness has had her licence revoked. Period.

So says a team of Canadian scientists who’ve decided Pre-Menstrual Syndrome is not a syndrome at all, but a convenient excuse for 80-percent of the world’s women to pay out on their partners once a month. Clearly those scientists haven’t met my husband – a man who consistently gets my goat one week in four.

Just because Canadians invented the foghorn and peanut paste doesn’t mean they understand women. I like to do the right thing and gift my man his independence during ‘that time of the month’: “Feel free to say and do as you please honey, because this weekend I’m going to bite your head off regardless.”

So how did the best Canadian minds determine that women are faking their Preposterous Mood Swings every month? And why was the research team all women? (Because no man was brave enough to volunteer?)

Based on a mere forty-one case studies, the scientists concluded that only six women could prove an emotional link between the end of their cycles and having more personalities than Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. The other 35 respondents must have shredded their questionnaires in a fit of rage after their husbands left yet another Kleenex in a trouser pocket on washing day.

Canadian husbands must be agreeable all the time because I never hear of Canadian wives doing their block about a load of washing ruined by a blizzard of man-tissue.

Ever since I became a maidservant, I have been socially conditioned to blame PMS for doing my lolly once a month. I am sweet and docile by nature, but around the 24th of each month my husband goes from being a calm, considerate friend and partner to a demanding, unreasonable oaf. I give him my raised eyebrow of doom and growl: “What did you say?” It’s not because I didn’t hear him, it’s because I’m giving him three seconds to improve on what he said.

Really, women wouldn’t need to manage their monthly anger if their partners could manage their stupidity. PMS was invented so women could have five days off from being nice to incompetents and idiots. Please don’t take that week away from us!

The research team at the University of Toronto kindly left womankind with one sliver of credibility. It found women weren’t imagining the physical symptoms of PMS: the cramps, the headaches, the bloating and the tiredness – they’re legitimate – we can enjoy those. But now we can’t blame hormones for any of the emotional baggage that piles up when our shop’s shut for maintenance.

I’m sorry, I’m different. Twelve times a year, I speak three languages – English, sarcasm and profanity. When my bloke asks: “What’s up Blossom?” he can measure the speed and gruffness of my: “Nothing!” to calculate just how much marital turbulence is heading his way.

My husband has the solution. He’s inventing a mobile phone app which will warn him when I am about to become all three witches of Eastwick. It will plot my cycle and give him a heads-up one week out from impending domestic catastrophe. That’s enough notice for him to plan a business trip out of town, or meetings to keep him working late in the office – any legitimate reason to be somewhere other than home. He’s going to call his invention the Grief-o-meter.

All men should consult their Grief-O-Meter before making plans with the wife for the week when pessimism is better than sex:  

‘Hey Blossom, let’s go see that Les Miserables flick?’

‘Nah, way too depressing.’

‘Why? The plot? Social injustice? An impoverished woman ruined by prejudice who dies emaciated and alone?  

‘No. I can’t stand a thin heroine.’

I say men are the missing ingredient in PMS – has anyone bothered to research whether the poor buggers actually deserve to be punished? My husband is not necessarily the innocent victim of a foul-tempered harridan who cries during cheesy Qantas ads.  

Having an unusually calm and rational temperament, I am pushed over the edge by floors decorated with dirty socks and a man who turns the pages of his newspaper so loudly I can’t hear Maggie Smith’s acidic one-liners in Downton Abbey. Those Canadians may claim women have lost the excuse of PMS, but they’ve have given us some much needed freedom. Now we can stop blaming our cycles and pinpoint the true cause of our anger – husbands.

I’m going to look on the bright side. If PMS no longer exists, then there’s no need to confine my grumpiness to the last five days of the month. I can spread the grief around any time I like. How exciting! Next time you see me, best you give way to my broomstick.

Racking up the years

Racking up the years
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West Magazine
Published Saturday February 23, 2013

My first bra came from Jayne Mansfield’s closet. At least it felt like it did. It was pale pink satin and doubled as a bullet-proof vest. The label said ‘Action’ bra but that was the last thing I was going to get in it. The hooks at the back were large enough to catch herring, there was not a skerrick of elastic for comfort and I needed to be Houdini to get in or out of it. Houdini, or a locksmith.

That bra came from the bottom of mum’s drawer of antiquity and I’m pretty sure the cups hadn’t seen breasts since 1953. But I was 13 and desperate. It was Thursday night, there was school on Friday and late night shopping hadn’t been invented. My breasts and I could not face another round of heckling from the leering boys who hung on the fence watching our school softball.

That afternoon, my bra-less dash round the bases clinched the game – but my breasts must have sailed over the home plate before I did, because those boys started cheering: ‘Hey yer headlights ‘r on! Yer blinding us with yer high beams!’

I was deflated. And humiliated. So that night, mum dug through her cupboard and unearthed her heirloom bra. I thought I was going to be swallowed in it, but if it kept my particulars under wraps, I was prepared to wear it. And so began a complicated relationship with my breasts.

For 30 years, I have re-played that bra-less home run as my Bo Derek moment. Me: nubile gazelle-woman, running in slow motion, nothing jiggling, just a gentle swaying up front, spectators mesmerised. That was until I took up jogging last year and the man of the house watched me stumble in through the gate: ‘Hey blossom, Dudley Moore would have been proud of that running style. Even sober.’

Having worn a bra since 1980, I’ve grown accustomed to constriction. (Breasts that don’t move are my objective now.) But women are never happy with what they’ve got. Breasts are always too small, too pointy, too cumbersome or just too big: those boobs so outspoken they take all the male attention off your face: ‘Hey soldier – eyes up and front!’

Why are men still fixated on breasts when half the population has them? And why are there so many names for them? In the 50’s there are photos of my mum in bras so pointy they could take your eye out: “Look at the lungs on that sheila!”. By the 60’s bosoms were ‘Bristol cities’ and winging it freestyle. In the 70’s,  ‘A Clockwork Orange’ called them ‘Groodies’ and then foxy mammas went disco: ‘Check out the rack on that chick!’ In 1982, Jane Fonda dressed her Pointer Sisters in lycra and aerobics took over the gym. By the time I was at school we were comparing ‘hooters’ and girls with ‘bodacious ta-ta’s’ were flaunting their assets every chance they got.   

Now I notice two types of women: those who dress for the breast and those who don’t – women are either offence or defence. Some breasts are so properly controlled they’re standoffish. Others aren’t shy enough – they’re in your face everywhere  – spilling out of the waitress’ uniform as she takes your order, or blindsiding you in the supermarket aisle.

I pity men confronted with a pair of barely contained breasts. Cleavage a woman can hide her keys in is like a car crash – no man can look away. I can’t either.

Fashionable women disguise their breasts in wonder-bras and push-ups, minimisers, firmers and separaters. Breasts can be made to look bigger, higher, friskier. It’s not until we get them home that they can really be themselves and relax. (Some relax better than others.)

The breast connoisseur I live with says bosoms quicken his pulse. That’s because until he’s allowed to unwrap them, he doesn’t know what he’s going to get: ‘I’ve never been disappointed. I’m just thrilled to see them in the wild at all.’

My breasts have served me well. They’ve done their hard work putting fat cheeks on three babies,they’ve not complained about getting up in the middle of the night or the endless dawn starts.

For that, breasts deserve some respect. Good manners dictate men don’t ogle women whose breasts are feeding babies. Or breasts that fall out of bathers while their owner gets dumped in the City Beach surf.

Maybe my breasts need to reclaim their charisma. Now I’ve finished with the business of procreation and my breasts can go back to being just for fun, I  have to juggle them into support mechanisms because they’re tired and can’t stay up late anymore.

Sometimes the sight of an impossibly pert pair of breasts makes me pine for those days when I didn’t realise how good mine were. Breasts start out in life as star-gazers and end up as path-finders, but all breasts get their quality time. I’m okay with what I’ve got. I think we’ve finally got the hang of each other.

Chewing the Fat

Chewing the Fat
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West Magazine
Published February 2, 2013

A few weekends back a girlfriend and I were at the beach for our first swim of the summer. It was an overcast morning and the water looked dark. We were trying to stave off the inevitable shock of cold water by discussing our chances of getting eaten by a shark. She turned to me and said: “Any self-respecting shark would take one look at me and say: Geez, I’m not that hungry.”

A real friend doesn’t lie about her weight. A real friend understands that a woman’s weight can be central to her mood: thin = happy, not thin = grumpy. My bathroom scales are an electronic slab of nastiness hell-bent on destroying my morning.

A nutritionist once told me: ”Do not weigh yourself every day, it’s bad for your mental health.” But most mornings, I roll out of bed, skip to the loo and then step daintily onto my scales. It takes about three seconds for them to calculate how many squares of cooking chocolate I had the night before and deliver up the numbers that have me inwardly cursing (and outwardly cranky) for the next half hour.

If the figure is really offensive, I move the scales around the bathroom floor, hoping a second (or third) try will give me a more considerate read-out. Sometimes I hold onto the door frame and voila! I weigh the same as I did when I was 18. Self delusion makes me thin.

When I ring a girlfriend to say: “Good morning, I am a circus tent” she doesn’t reply: ‘Hey, I’ve lost three kilos and I’m back to what I weighed on my wedding day.” Instead she sympathises: ”I weigh the same as the day I gave birth to my third child.”

My Adonis does not realise that all nearly all women obsess about their weight, usually to their partner’s detriment. (The fatter we feel, the thinner our libido.)

Don’t get me wrong, we’re not so shallow that our weight is all we care about. We have discussed at length our disappointment that even the head of the CIA can’t have an affair without getting caught. We worry Julia Gillard was talked into becoming a redhead by her hairdresser boyfriend. And then we go back to our weight, because society demands that the female of our species should always be pert and thin. Any woman who has had children or is within fifteen years of menopause knows pert requires surgery and pert andthin is a pipe dream.

I have two lovely pals who meet with me every Friday morning. Our husbands think it’s a weekly discussion to exchange housekeeping tips, and how to serve up more marital happiness. But really those girlfriends come to my house to find out what the scales of injustice say. Having starved ourselves all morning for ‘weigh-in,’ the more sensible one of us records the offensive number of kilos in her diary. Then we put the bad news behind us and get down to the more important business of tea and cake.

I wouldn’t miss those Fridays for quids. They began five years ago when we decided one of us might need a weekly catch-up to help her endure the horrors of chemotherapy. (We didn’t need to weigh her to know she was thin.)

Since then there has been a wonderful survival story, one last baby, two husbands’ vasectomies, two new places to live, one new career and several sets of hateful scales. Cancer free and in perfect nick, the most disciplined of our threesome now sympathises with the two of us whose blasted weight has stayed more or less the same, always five kilos too many.

We still de-brief every Friday, except now we use ‘weigh-in’ as an excuse to check up on each other and restore some girly equilibrium.

What Friday weigh-ins are good for is motivation. The three of us come away hardened with steelier resolve to be Elle McPherson pure about what we eat. (Usually sabotaged by Troy Buswell self-control.) On occasion our iron will has lasted a whole week – the record is three months -but usually we’re texting each other by Friday night: “Do organic brownies count?” (Apparently, if they came from the health food shop, they have no calories.)

For me, trying to lose weight at this time of year is hopeless. And pointless. There are too many good things to eat. So I’m going to move those scales around the house until I find that elusive G-spot  – G for gravity. That’s the spot where a slight incline confuses the scale’s pea-sized brain into thinking I’m three kilos lighter. I have high hopes for that bit of the kitchen floor that dips as it merges with the pantry. If my plan fails, I’ll just use the stupid scales as a step-up to reach the top shelf. I’m sure that’s where I hid the last of the cooking chocolate.

Tangling with a bad hair day

Tangling with a bad hair day
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Saturday January 12, 2013
Section: Opinion

A hair cut is not a trifling matter. This, men do not understand. To a man, a haircut is a way to kill fifteen minutes of a lunch hour. It involves no more mental taxation than reclining in a swivel chair arguing with a barber about Shane Warne’s discipline problem.

For women, a haircut is the fastest route to an identity crisis. Period. It can coincide with that too. I should know – I just had one – a haircut, and a freak-out. Some people will no longer recognize me because I’ve gone short – I had a whole 3 centimetres cut off. For me, a change is nowhere near as good as a holiday.

Men should also know that women have a fraught relationship with their hair because hair the only thing that can be changed at whim. And let’s face it, most women grow up wanting to change everything about themselves. Well at least I did.

I was seven when I began noticing Serena down the road had a shiny blonde ponytail like Barbie, while I had limping stick-brown plaits like a Holly Hobby doll.

My downward comparisons got worse as I became a teenager. I measured myself against other girls according to blondeness or cascading wavy-ness – and was always left lacking and dissatisfied. It was the start of an uncomfortable relationship with being female, of wasting a significant portion of my young life sizing myself up against some narrow measure of the perfect woman’s exterior.

I was in my 20’s by the time I realized my insecurities were simply character weaknesses, and I could fix those. I decided that my negative body image was unhealthy and perverse, and I would no longer indulge it (except during ‘that time of the month,’ when nothing is curable and there is no bright side.)

Women have a peculiar knack for self-loathing, something I’ve rarely seen in a man. Really, it’s a nauseatingly first world problem – I’m sure if we had to rifle through a rubbish tip to find dinner or wash our clothes on a rock by the river, we wouldn’t be giving two hoots about our hair. (We’d probably have sold it off to some merchant making fake hair extensions for the elaborately coiffed in Perth.)

Self-loathing is the flipside of self-obsession, two symptoms of that disease called vanity. Vanity must also be a side-effect of not having enough to do. I’m sure it’s nice to always look flawless – but those who aspire to perfection must find themselves slave to an entirely joyless process. After all, a bad hair day can ambush even the most military of beauty regimes.

I like to miss a few gym sessions and lose control at the smorgasbord because, well  – because I can. My friends won’t desert me and I like to imagine my husband will still think I’m a fox – he’s seen me thin(ish) and also 9-months pregnant, and hasn’t passed judgment on either. (Smart men never do.)

The cult of female beauty is ingrained at an early age. In high school, I must have frittered away days of my life wishing for longer legs and less curves, obsessing over my Roman nose and muscly calves. I couldn’t see anything but my faults. I was the sum total of a collection of ugly body parts.

Insecure as a teenager, I often mistook sexual harassment for compliments. Once, when the father of a girlfriend pinned me up against the wall of his shed after school, I felt flattered instead of repulsed. I look back on that day and still feel incredulous that my self esteem was then propped on such flimsy scaffolding.

I had the best of role models – a mum who was confident, positive, and motivated to keep fit and eat well – no closet psychoses there. I had female teachers I admired and respected, aunties and friends’ mothers I loved to bits who told me I was kind and intelligent, not pretty and thin. (I wished they’d said ‘funny’, because funny can compensate for all other shortfalls.)

I look back now and see I was much like every other girl, and every other girl was much like me: consumed with the glorified images of the impossibly glamorous models in our Dolly magazines. And yet as wives and mothers, when we’re trying to trying to stay sane juggling parenthood and working and caring for extended families, I find some women are still as competitive as ever. I don’t get it – are they forever desperate to outshine the sisterhood?  Is this relentless pursuit of perfection some misguided attempt at one-upmanship? What the blazes for? I can only surmise that there are women who need to feel envied to feel good about themselves.  In my imperfect world, that looks to me like low self-esteem. Can’t we all just admire each other?

I’ve decided the best test of a woman’s vanity is a hideous haircut – the kind of haircut that you can see is a disaster even before they’ve finished drying it.  I can recall the taste of rising panic as it dawned on me that the he-she with the scissors did his apprenticeship as a butcher, not as a hair ‘artiste.’ There I sat – (under that black plastic shroud that’s always too tight around your neck) – struck mute by the dawning realization that for the next three months, my new do would be the new don’t. And when he’d finished his masterpiece, and I was looking as inviting as a soup sandwich, I got up and grinned stupidly: “Thank you so much – no, no – really, I love it,” handed over $150 and sobbed all the way home in the car.’ People who are vain are also smart enough to cause a scene belittling the hair-man so that at least they get a free disaster, and scare off all the other clients.

I have an impeccably stylish friend who claims hair, skin, weight and clothes, in that order, betray a woman’s age. Oh dear, so boring hair now makes you look decrepit too? I’ve had it up to pussy’s bow with stylers, straighteners and hot tongs. Those blasted appliances take up fifteen minutes of my sixteen minute daily beauty regime. After all, it’s just hair, it’s not even alive, but it’s the most demanding thing I own. And I expect it will be until I’m the owner of a perm and a blue rinse. At least then I’ll take comfort in knowing the one upside to death will be never having to think about my hair.