My first gray hair turned up when I was a sophomore in college — twenty years old and full of sass and gumption. No way I was going to let anyone see THAT nonsense. I headed to the salon and promptly covered up my defect with fifty bucks worth of highlights and lowlights, glad I escaped a dangerously close marring of my youthful image.

After a few years of salon visits, the grays were multiplying and my “career” as a student teacher didn’t exactly provide the means to fund my self-preservation project, so off to Walgreen’s I went to find a box of hair color to restore my dark curls at a fraction of the cost of salon color.

In the beginning, I wrapped myself in a color cape every eight weeks or so, humming along to Counting Crows and Pearl Jam in my Marquette apartment, watching the timer tick for thirty minutes before rinsing myself back to the security of 5C Brilliant Brunette.

Ahh. That’s better.

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