This is about growing old, but still being interested in sex sufficiently to want to express something about oneself by one’s appearance.
My hair has been white for years. Growing tired of it, I decided to colour it red, purple, or pink. I found on Google that food colouring was cheap and effective, as well as easy to apply. So my hair has been pink for several weeks now, and I think it’s fine. Nobody has criticised, and only one person, a technician servicing our air conditioner, has asked about it, in quite a friendly way.
I used red food colouring, which is E124, a synthetic red azo dye made from petroleum products. It seems to be banned in the USA and some other countries, but not in Australia. In my childhood we used ‘cochineal’ for red colouring of cakes. It was made from the bodies of cochineal insects.
There are instructions on Google for using food colouring on hair, but they are unnecessarily complicated. It’s really simply a matter of having clean hair, rubbing some diluted colour well into it, drying, rinsing thoroughly, and then drying again. The colour is very ‘fast’; that is, it lasts a long time, in my experience, through six shampoos. Regardless of the US ban. I believe it is non-toxic in this use, as well as being a fraction of the price of the dyes you might obtain from a ‘drug store’, and a minute fraction of what you’d pay at a hairdresser’s.
Why should interesting colours be the sole province of women? Or the way we show ouselves be regulated by gender or even fashion? That kind of pressure is only for teenagers who are in great fear of peer pressure. I’m for individual choice.
Filed under: Autobiographical, Sex, Writing
