My Embarrassing Lifelong Obsession with Blondness
By: Phoenix Huber
Tags: Beauty, Mental Health, Equality, Self Love, Hair

My Embarrassing Lifelong Obsession with Blondness

I judged myself and everyone I knew based on our hair colors

Photo by Daniel Bernard on Unsplash

For the first decade of my adult life, I’ve lived with reduced anxiety and relative freedom from the major depression that overshadowed my teenage years. I attribute my improved mental health fortune to a transformative year of therapy (or technically, the Lefkoe Method) that I underwent during my first semester of college.

However, one neurosis that did not end was my embarrassing obsession with hair color. I still catch myself fixating in the mirror for far too long, and it’s prolonged the shadow of my former mental suffering.

One factor that inhibits healing, I’ve realized, is shame and secrecy. While confessing to my general insecurities has been easier, I’ve felt mortified to admit the full extent of my blond hair obsession and, especially, its racist underpinnings.

Writing this story is part of my recovery, and I hope it helps anyone else out there who’s suffered over comparing your natural features to others. May we all get to experience ourselves and each other as uniquely beautiful.

Having blond hair became my self-esteem strategy.

One of the concepts I learned from the Lefkoe Method was “survival strategies.” As young children, we tend to internalize criticism or disappointment from others by feeling like we’re not good enough. The survival strategies are how we reassure ourselves that we’re actually okay!

During my upbringing, the strategies I leaned on to salvage my self-esteem included:

being seemingly smart, talented, unique, or perfect

having people think highly of me

being blond and having good hair (conforming to beauty standards)

I’m embarrassed by the superiority/inferiority complex I developed around blondness.

Understanding why I’d been obsessed with smarts and approval was easy. My displays of intelligence were praised early on and I clung to the validation. Tracing back my obsession with hair was more elusive. I felt disturbed by my participation in racism and didn’t want to face it.

As blond children, my sisters and I were complimented on our flaxen heads. Elders who had once been blond probably saw it as a fleeting, enviable trait, like seeing a flowering plant in a rare stage of bloom.

Lots of stories seemed to be about blond princesses. Meanwhile, our history textbooks made whites the protagonists. Other colors were portrayed as the unlucky ones or supporting cast.

I don’t know just how it happened, but in my mind, blond people were the prettiest. It insinuated racism against whites with darker features and especially against people of color.

This made me feel superior — but eventually, inferior, as I grew up and my hair darkened.

I bleached my hair, yet hypocritically judged others’ hair-dyeing as “fake.”

I remember the day someone told me my hair would later turn brown. I was horrified. Surely my body would not betray me so!

And the day my hair was first referred to as “dirty blond.”

By halfway through seventh grade, I had had enough of my increasingly matte, ashy shade of ex-golden. I complained to my mom, divulging my infatuation with the impeccable long blond tresses of some of my classmates.

Mom helped brush this magical potion called Sun-In through my hair. Thus began my first, furtive attempt at at-home highlights.

Of course, it’s not like I was going to give away that genetics had rudely revoked my natural blond card. When schoolmates enquired, I acted as if nothing had changed. What, suddenly three shades lighter? Since when?

Other ways of explaining away one’s sudden increase in hair brightness:

I’ve been spending so much time in the sun!

My roots are darker because my hair is darkening over time.

In exchange for being good, the hair fairy hath blessed me with +2 blondness points!

The whole thing seems silly now. Why should it matter whether one’s hair color is “real?” Hair looks how it looks. You can be content to keep it or decide to change it. A naturally blond person is not more beautiful, pure, or blessed by the gods.

Yet, I judged other people who dyed their hair, as if natural beauty were best and any form of enhancement was dishonest.

Watch out for racism on the internet.

As my internet browsing increased, I found a possibly racist site that glamorized being “born blond.” The site suggested blonds were victims of stereotypes and appropriation. It didn’t acknowledge the real racism against non-white people.

Fortunately, besides the “Born Blond” site I don’t remember any overtly racist webpages that fed my prejudice. Although I did spam-visit the Wikipedia pages on different hair colors to keep my obsession fresh. This led me to become interested in the countries where blond hair was the most prevalent, irrationally wishing I had ancestry from them.

Even though I gave up my racism-fueled web browsing, the fact that I was once allured by those bad ideas never stopped feeling unsettling.

Growing long (blond) hair was how I expressed my trans girlhood as a teen.

Another reason I got “stuck” on hair is that it was one of the few means by which I could express my femininity and my gender identity.

I passionately loathed having to wear boys’ clothes. I tried to end up with the least baggy, shortest shorts possible or just opted for neutral-looking jeans with a T-shirt. Though I couldn’t wear girl clothes and kept my private thoughts about gender to myself, having long hair was one way I got away with expressing my femininity for others to see.

My hair had completely grown out to its natural dishwater color, but in senior year I snuck a bottle of lemon juice into the bathroom and brushed it through. It actually came out looking quite good, except for the frizz and tangles.

Having my hair issues be wrapped up with gender dysphoria made it more complicated to let go of. These days, I find other ways to feel feminine and affirm who I am so I know that I’m more than the strands on my head.

Watching movies made my obsession with blond hair worse.

Around that time, I grew attached to a beautiful movie star with doll-like features whose long blond hair always looked “perfect” and “so natural.” Now I could stand in front of the mirror for 30 minutes after watching one of her films and try to convince my lemony locks looked somewhat like hers.

In reality, my favorite movie star’s fluctuating roots revealed that she too had naturally dull blond or mousy brown hair. Her hair either got lightened on purpose or by accident, which I’ve learned can easily happen because so many regular hair products contain limonene from lemons, we swim in the salty ocean, et cetera.

But when I saw those movies scenes of the actress singing in the sun, every nuanced shimmer in her styled, wavy blond hair rippling in the wind like a nature-made strand of art, I became obsessed. I felt like all I wanted was to look like her and sing like her. I felt like a hypnotized fan at a magic show who can’t see past the illusion of the stage tricks.

As I neared my twenties, my hairline showed its first signs of recession. My blondness obsession thereby got transferred to an anti-baldness campaign.

This other dimension of my hair neuroticism brought up additional ugly prejudices. I fell for the ageism of airbrushed media, where the young and the full heads of hair are glamorized. Plus, I was sexistly thinking that women were better than men due to lacking male pattern baldness, while at the same time objectifying women and thinking their self-worth = their beauty.

To this day, I’m on-and-off in my hair neuroticism.

Since my first highlights at age 12, the pattern has mostly looked like this:

Let my roots grow out. Forget about blondness for a while. Have peace of mind, but also feel less sexy.

My hair becomes too brown to bear, and I start idolizing others’ blondness again. I guiltily shower with a bottle of blond shampoo.

At first, the change is exciting. Then, I stare at my highlights a lot and freak out because I decide they’re too streaky and unnatural-looking. I’ve once again “ruined” my hair. I keep obsessing and vacillating between pride and humiliation.

Until finally, it all gets to be too much. I stop staring at my hair and begin avoiding the mirror. I go back to feeling perpetually peripherally dissatisfied with the way I look, resigned to my perceived incurable ugliness as a person having imperfect, thinning, not-naturally-blond-anymore hair.

How am I healing from my obsession with blondness?

I know it’s natural to want to look as appealing as possible, and maybe there is something eye-catching about blond hair. But my obsession with having a perfect blond mane has been over-the-top. It’s defeated my attempts to be beautiful because I’ve been too distracted over one detail to take better care of my holistic health, overall style, and inner beauty.

Here are a few things I have been doing to heal my relationship with hair:

Listening to other people’s hair struggles. Especially those of non-white or people of color, as I can hear a different side of the story that is often more difficult than mine and which puts my petty issues into perspective.

The Duolingo Spanish podcast had on Cirle Tatis Arzuza, a black Colombian woman who grew up being taught her curly hair was bad. She suffered through harsh chemical treatments that led to major hair loss, before finally embracing her natural hair beauty. She became a hairstylist who spreads awareness with her YouTube channel “Pelo Bueno.”

Here are a few more stories I loved:

2. I meditated on that favorite blond actress I used to watch. I apologized for equating her with her looks, and I told her the nonphysical things I appreciated about her. Visualizing healing conversations with people I can’t reach in person is nice. Then when old negative thoughts come, it loops back into the soothing memory of the conversation and I feel better automatically.

3. I do exercises where I talk to my body as if it were its own separate being. I wouldn’t want to reduce anyone’s worth to a single attribute, so I can’t objectify my body either. I compliment each body part on its beauty and the amazing functions it fulfills. I communicate with my hair as if it were a child whom I’ve mistreated and am learning to truly love.

4. I forgive myself. Everyone is vulnerable to developing insecurities that they feed with prejudiced ideas. I try to be self-compassionate and understanding as I would be with a friend.

5. I’m unlearning the perception of beauty as a prize we each hoard for ourselves. Instead, beauty is a gift that we give to each other. Being beautiful in my own way is about being an enjoyable person for others, rather than maximizing my own satisfaction with how I look in the mirror.

6. Sharing this story helps relieve the pressures I’ve felt around my obsession. I hope reading this has been to your benefit as well. Whatever body image struggles you have may experienced, you are more than good enough, hair or no hair, and you a beautiful person.