Fade to Blonde

It took not one, but two days of six-hour sessions to get to a passably blond hair color. At the end of the first, I left thinking I looked strawberry blond. At home, my neighbor set me straight: My hair was actually Irish-jig red. I could have auditioned for "The Lord of the Dance." After much on-the-phone complaining -- and then begging -- with my stylist ("You were happy with it when you left," she kept saying, impatiently, in Spanish), she took me in for another session, gratis, to add blond highlights. And that, she told me, was as blond as I was going to get. My hair certainly didn't look God-given, but at least it could reasonably be described as blond.

When I got home, my sister, her boyfriend, my neighbor and my boyfriend gathered around. The unanimous verdict: a thumbs-up. Only one person registered disapproval: my 5-year-old daughter, Natalia. "Mami, you painted your hair," she said, running her hands over my tresses. "Your hair is dark like mine."

I've always been the culturally conscious parent, making sure she had plenty of "Dora the Explorer" DVDs to offset the glossy, blond perfection of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Barbie and countless other mermaids and fairies. But in my rush to seize my blond moment, it hadn't occurred to me that my daughter might connect my change to her own stunning, raven hair. I'd be going back to my real hair color soon, I told myself.

IN HER BOOK BLONDE LIKE ME, author Natalia Ilyin describes the blond effect as "a gentle rise in the tidewaters of public friendliness." In her brightest moments, the blond Ilyin reports, she was the recipient of impulsive marriage proposals and the cause of minor traffic accidents; at times she felt like "power and sex personified" -- exactly as I'd always thought blond life would be.

My expectations for myself were more modest. A compliment -- or a drink? -- from a stranger. Salesclerks with suddenly improved attitudes. A heightened interest in what I had to say.

In the first few days, my new hair color definitely gave me a little buzz. At brunch, my family suggested that it flattered my skin tone, maybe even more than my natural color did. And my boyfriend's growled comment, "You look gooood," had me feelin' frisky. We were both getting a nice boost from my frosted tresses.

But there were unexpected bumps along the way. The day after my initial salon visit, my reflection caught me by surprise as I came out of a bathroom stall. What I saw in that unself-conscious moment: bland, blah, like-everybody-else-ness. I'm light-skinned, with what can be described as Caucasian features. To many people -- Latinos and Anglos alike -- I don't "look Latina." Until that moment, I'd had no idea that I wielded my black hair in the same way that I use the accent in my first name and my long, vowel-ending hyper-ethnic last name: as a banner, letting people know in no uncertain terms "Sí, soy Latina!" Without it, I felt erased.

Entire books have been written about blondness. Ilyin's made the biggest impression, because there I found a perfect description of my motivations: I was what Ilyin calls an "ironic blond," someone making a statement with an overt appropriation of a style not originally intended for her. Think Madonna, Li'l Kim or RuPaul, who, when questioned about the politics of his wigs, said, "I'm not going to pass as white, and I'm not trying to . . . [but] I want to create outrageous sensation, and blond hair against brown skin is a gorgeous, outrageous combination."

Gorgeous outrageousness was also what I was after, especially as I prepared to attend the Latino alumni reception at my alma mater. Imagining gasps and looks of horror, I planned ahead, getting a spray tan and even considering (briefly) wearing the blue contact lenses that would create a perfect fake hair/fake eyes/fake tan triumvirate of wildly inappropriate personal grooming choices for a politically correct college-educated Latina. Oh, the whispers, the stares, the scandal!

But when I arrived at the dinner and met friends I hadn't seen in years, they embraced me and said . . . "Hi." I felt the need to explain my experiment, but if the women said anything about my hair, it was that they really liked it. That threw me off. They weren't supposed to actually like me as a blonde, much less tell me I looked better. I waited expectantly for the reaction from one friend in particular, Jenny. An architect of the hunger-strike-building-takeover-sparking-massive-national-media-attention endeavor, she was Puerto Rican, worked for a nonprofit and lived in a predominantly Latino section of town. In other words, homegirl was down. When she saw me she, said, "Oh, you changed your hair." I complimented her on her 'do, and I'm pretty sure that after that we went and got a drink from the open bar. Nothing else. Nada.

There was only one friend, a black woman, who told me she thought I looked "less Latina." On a black or darker-skinned Latina woman, she said, blond was okay; they'd never be mistaken for either being white or wanting to look as if they were. But on me, with my fair skin and straight hair, it was too close to "passing" for her comfort. The closest I can get to blond-on-brown outrageousness is to get a fake tan. But no one would think I was embarking on a subversive beauty experiment. They'd just assume I was trying to get a job at Hooters.

Iris was now a brunette working for the Cleveland port authority. She'd attended this Latino alumni event every year since its inception, she said, flying in from Ohio for the weekend. She seemed amused that I remembered her as a blonde.