Becoming a Redhead

On hair dye, identity, and choosing yourself on purpose

Photo by Valentin Lacoste on Unsplash

I’m not a natural redhead.

But at this point, it feels dishonest to call myself anything else.

The curvy redhead with expressive eyes and strong opinions is so deeply who I am that most people assume it’s who I’ve always been.

It isn’t.

I became her instead.

I’ve been dyeing my hair for so long that very few people know my natural hair color anymore. (It’s a lovely ashy brown. Both my daughters inherited it.) And while I pull off red well, I’m probably not fooling anyone. Not with the darker eyebrows and the several-hours-every-ten-weeks salon commitment required to maintain my current coppery situation.

I remember the first time I dyed my hair. I was 16. My friends and I bought box dye from CVS, and I chose a lovely auburn. Except after I dyed it, the red barely showed up against my naturally darker hair.

And obviously, if nobody could tell I had dyed my hair, then what was even the point?

So I did what any reasonable 16-year-old would do and bought another box. The result was bright red hair that looked… deeply unfortunate.

When my mom got home from work and saw what I had done, she sighed the sigh of a woman who immediately understood this was now going to cost professional money. She made me an appointment with her stylist, who had been cutting and coloring her hair for years but, up until that moment, had only been trusted to cut mine.

My hair was salvaged. And thus began a lifelong love affair with hair dye.

Over the next 25 years, I cycled through just about every major hair color. Brunette. Blonde (honestly, not bad, but the maintenance nearly killed me). Every possible variation of red, from copper to violet, with enough highlights and lowlights to keep several salons in business.

But for the last 15 years, it’s only been red.

Somewhere along the line, I decided that red was who I wanted to be.

Recently, I read a piece by Grace Sarah about continuing to color her gray hair, despite all the messaging women get about aging naturally. She wrote that she wasn’t ready to become a different person yet.

And it made me realize something: I no longer think of being a redhead as a beauty choice. It feels like part of my identity now. Because the funny thing about choosing a version of yourself long enough is that eventually she just becomes real.

My most recent post-salon selfie

I didn’t “discover” that I was secretly a redhead deep inside. I became one through repetition and choice. Appointment by appointment. Shade by shade. Year after year.

We talk about authenticity like it’s something you uncover naturally and effortlessly. But I think sometimes authenticity is constructed.

There’s a tendency to treat women’s beauty rituals as shallow or frivolous. The hair appointments. The makeup. The facials. As if caring how you look automatically makes you less serious.

But I think choosing how you present yourself can actually be a form of authorship.

Sometimes, becoming yourself starts with deciding how you want to be seen.

Maybe your hair color isn’t as central to your identity as being a redhead is to mine.

But most of us are curating ourselves in ways both large and small. Our tastes. Our boundaries. Our style. Our homes. The lives we want to build.

Midlife is when we finally realize we’re allowed to do that intentionally.

And getting to choose is its own kind of power.

Every time I go to the salon, I ask Emily — my stylist for years now, who I’ve followed to multiple salons — what we can do that’s just a little bit different.

I want to stay red. But maybe slightly brighter. Slightly richer. Slightly more coppery. Something subtle that probably nobody notices except me.

I guess that 16-year-old who bought a second box of hair dye because the first one wasn’t dramatic enough is still inside me somewhere, thinking: what’s the point if people can’t tell?

And every time I leave the salon, I post a picture on my Instagram story and tag Emily so she gets credit for her work, usually with some variation of:

“Thanks for making me feel like myself again.”

Which is objectively a funny thing to say about a hair color I wasn’t born with.

But maybe that’s the point.

We spend so much time treating the things women choose — the hair color, the lipstick, the clothes, the rituals, even the confidence itself — as somehow less authentic than the things that came naturally.

But choosing counts too.

I may not have been born a redhead.

But I became her anyway.