At three minutes to midnight four weeks into NSW’s coronavirus lockdown, I decided to dye my hair pink.
It turns out a lot of other people had the same idea, even celebrities: 90s superstars like Sarah Michelle Gellar and Jennifer Love Hewitt did it, as did the rising musical star Dua Lipa. Even Cardi B tried on a pink wig.
So I had a problem. The temporary pink dye from L’Oreal Paris that I’d usually see at my local Priceline and Chemist Warehouse was sold out, and couldn’t be ordered online due to ‘low/unknown stock”.
After several Google searches, I bought a bottle of Ultra Rose Shampoo from the Australian brand Muvo. It promised to temporarily dye my hair a shade of pink. The intensity would depend on how long I left it in. Although it hasn’t sold out, Muvo’s business development manager, Christa Silvia, says it has sold more over the past few weeks but has also increased its marketing.
Several hairdressers confirm they’ve seen a surge in clients dyeing their hair bright shades of blue, pink and purple while stuck in home isolation.
Unnatural hair colours might seem like a youthful folly, but Blake James, owner of salon Mr Burrows in Sydney, says lockdown is the first chance many of his older clients have had to try something new. At home they aren’t bucking their workplaces’ strict dress codes.
The forced period at home has also given first-time dyers the chance to “get confident with the change themselves, before having to be confident with it in front of other people”.
My friend Michael Sun added green streaks to his jet-black hair: “I’ve wanted to do something to my hair for such a long time. If we weren’t going into the lockdown, I would have wavered a lot longer … it was a catalyst for me. If it fails, I will potentially have the next few months to hide it.”
Dr Paula Joyce, a 68-year-old professor of education from Perth, went electric pink around the same time for the opposite reason. She had no intention of hiding it.
Worried about how her university students would cope with transitioning to online classes, Joyce thought she would “give them something just to come in and break the ice”.
“So I came into class, they looked at me and said, ‘Oh my god, what have you done with your hair!?’ It really did achieve its purpose.”
Although Joyce says she “never really wanted to go pink before”, she did have a pink-tinted conditioner in her cupboard. Using it has done more than pique her students’ attention.
“It’s changing me. I tend to be an extreme introvert and quite frankly, I don’t want the lockdown to end,” she laughs. “But I just think it’s fabulous. I want to dress up and go out for the first time in … years.”
Unlike Joyce, I had been thinking about dyeing my hair since I was 18. Going pink was the reward I dangled in front of myself to get through every law school exam, a metaphorical way of liberating my future self from being an exhausted, regimented student. But I never did it.
In popular culture, a major hair change is often precipitated by a major life change (usually a breakup). Blake confirms there’s an element of truth to this. A lot of his clients ask for a dramatic transformation after switching jobs or ending relationships.
“I had long hair down to my shoulders,” he confesses. “And I just shaved it off three weeks ago … I have a staff of 17 people. To go from that to nothing within a day, it was soul-destroying. I had a full-on Britney moment, had three bottles of wine, shaved it off, and woke up the next morning thinking what the fuck have I done.”
Sitting on the edge of my bathtub, my boyfriend clumsily smearing plum-coloured shampoo through the strands I’d missed at the nape of my neck, I wondered the same thing. For the first time in my life my towel-dried hair emerged not blonde but a deep shade of rose.
Now I’m waking up earlier to style it and I find joy in the moments I catch a lolly-coloured strand out of the corner of my eye.
Dyeing my hair wasn’t a way of dealing with change, but a way of compensating for a lack of it. The weeks at home can now be demarcated into before and after. Recycled outfits feel different when paired with pink locks.
“Just be careful,” Sun warns me, laughing. “Dyeing your hair once is a gateway drug. You’ll probably have lilac hair by July.”
