This just in: "iridescent" = pink

Apparently L'Oreal, flush with multinational power, has decided that they're able to make words in the English language mean whatever they want. Unchecked corporate greed is scary in more ways than one. Just a little warning for anybody that might be thinking of dying their hair with L'Oreal Feria shade #62 - "Iridescent Light Brown"; in real English it should actually be called "Light Red Brown, Only We Don't Want to Say Red Because It's Not Orangey Red Like Real Red Hair Is But Actually Kind of Pinkish". So you can see how they would have trouble fitting that on the box, hence the quick fix of simply redefining the word "iridescent". Silly me, I thought iridescent light brown would just be a little lighter than regular light brown, maybe with highlights, especially since the model on the front of the box had no red in her hair whatsoever that I could see (and certainly no pink). Of course the model on the front of the box was also hispanic, with extravagantly chunky blonde highlights that obviously did not result from a single-process haircolor, so maybe I should have known to worry, but I just thought they were being multicultural.

Hop out of the shower after rinsing it out, and as my hair begins to dry I can't help noticing that my roots are pink. Bubblegum pink. But just the roots. That caused what I'm sure would have been an entertaining scene of panic, except that my sweet baboo is in Chicago and thus there was nobody there to see. On the bright side, Frankie Avalon immediately descended from the ceiling to serenade me with "Beauty School Dropout".

Called the L'Oreal hotline and spoke to a lady with a professionally soothing voice who unfortunately undercut her own patter of "don't worry, we're going to fix it" by trying to convince me that I should have known that "iridescent" meant pink. "It's like the shine on the surface of a pearl, it's kind of pink, right?" Only if it's a pink pearl, lady. After we got past that argument she asked, worry in her voice, if I had piled my dye-soaked hair on top of my head during the 25 minutes it takes for the color to develop. Well, yeah, I had, seeing as how that was what the instructions said to do. But no, by doing so I had increased the concentration of dye on the roots and kept air from getting to them, thus causing the color result to be more "intense" on the roots than anywhere else. For future reference, I was sternly instructed that us girls with hair longer than shoulder-length should just let it hang down our backs (and drip all over everything, staining the floor, apparently) while the dye is on. Good to know, L'Oreal! Thanks for the $10 coupon, ya nitwits!

Finally she gave me two options to try -- either jump right back in the shower before my hair was even dry and wash it with the harshest, most color-stripping shampoo I had on hand, or wait 24 hours and dye over it with regular ol' "Light Brown". So I tried the former and shampooed three times. Then I yanked my hair straight back while still wet, went to work, and called my best friend to whine and complain for 20 minutes (mandated by law for girls in these kinds of situations). She made many soothing noises and then finally said, keeping her voice carefully neutral, "Take a picture."

The anticlimax to the story, however, is that when my hair dried the second time it looked much less pink. Much less. And as the day went on and I kept ducking into the bathroom at work to stare at my hair, I began to be rather perversely fond of it. It still isn't really any color that would occur in nature, which is not normally what I shoot for when it comes to hairdye, but what the hell. I'm iridescent, dammit.

In other news, individually-packaged pieces of string cheese feel almost identical to tampons when you fish for them in your purse without looking.