I’ve been a blonde for my whole life. Like most girls with light hair, the sun plays a big part of that. Since I wasn’t getting as much sun in the winter, my hair always got darker, to even a dishwater phase. This year was no exception and come Christmas it practically looked like my license was lying. So, at the end of January, I decided to commit and really become brunette for a month just, just because. However, I ended up affecting a lot more in my life than the color I filled my eyebrows in with. I gained a different perspective on what role hair color played in my life and, subsequently, the lives of brunettes in Chicago. I experienced the good, the bad, and the ugly in this month and I was extremely stoked to become blonde again.
The Good: I didn’t have the “dumb blonde” stereotype.
I’m a member of the College of Business and honestly, it’s extremely intimidating. In my experience, most people are trying to prove that they’re better than you, have more connections than you, and I’m pretty confident a past time of theirs is making people who are trying their best to feel very, very small. In the past year and a half, I’ve found myself compensating for my lack of a ten-year plan and overly justifying my right to speak up in class. This past month, however, I felt more confident raising questions and speaking out answers I wasn’t completely sure of. I started shrugging my shoulders when I was told I was only sort of right, instead of feeling like the entire class was rolling their eyes at me. I found myself stating ideas without adding, “at least that’s the impression I got from the reading.” I didn’t even realize that my confidence in my intelligence was so low until it was raised to the level I have in my LAS and Honors classes. It’s entirely possible that I just now got into the groove of the university, but maybe not.
The Bad: I experienced less chivalry, overall.
It’s not as if I’m a princess who can’t open doors for myself or catch the next elevator, but it was kind of lame that I had to do it all month. I’m one of the first people to describe myself as a feminist and I truly believe that just like I expect men to hold doors for me, I hold doors for other people. However, I noticed that these actions were reciprocated, at best. No, people weren’t mean to me, but it was shocking how much less chivalry was directed my way now that I was a brunette. I never really thought of the people around me as being extremely gentlemanly towards me, until it was a less common experience. However, when once or twice a week these things did happen, I was much more grateful.
The Ugly: I experienced different, less frequent street harassment.
Street harassment, unfortunately, is something that women grow so accustomed to that we grow to just tune it out. It wasn’t until the end of my first week as a brunette that I realized I had experienced extremely peaceful train rides and walks around Chicago. At first, that was enough selling for me. I basically has decided I was going to be brunette for the rest of my life. Then, I was harassed as a brunette. I was on the train and a man I didn’t know kept asking me questions, including asking what stop I was getting off at. Not a single person helped me when I wouldn’t tell him these things. For me, street harassment is normally comments about my appearance, cat calls, or general buffoonery that I could just keep walking away from or past. I thought this was an isolated incident that would have happened to me regardless of my hair color, but then a similar thing happened to me at Jewel, not even a week later. I had just finished checking out and was headed home until a man stopped me in my tracks. The worst part about my experience being brunette is that the street harassment was aggressive and demanded your attention. While I was able to passively dismiss it as a blonde, I was not given that option as a brunette.
At the end of the day, it was fun to live as the same person and yet see how much trivial things such as our appearance shape our daily lives. At the weather heats up, I’ll be glad to be getting back to my light roots, but I’ll always have my experience of being a brunette, if only for a very short amount of time.