How Mercury Retrograde & I Ruined Gaia Matisse’s Hair
Last Sunday’s futuristic-themed annual Met Gala event featured a number of celebs sporting bleached eyebrows, so naturally, I thought to try it out myself. Actually, I asked a friend, Gaia Matisse, to bleach my eyebrows for me, and then in return, I would dye her hair platinum blonde with an at-home box dye. Which, as any modern woman knows is a terrible idea.
First, we bleached my eyebrows. It was a fairly simple process, involving a mixture of two lil’ Sally Hansen Creme Bleach products, a thick, creamy application of the paste onto half of my forehead, and a waiting period of approximately 8 minutes. While waiting for my eyebrows to lighten, we watched the Justin Bieber movie and ate Salt n’ Straw ice cream.
I dyed Gaia’s hair with my own two hands, which was a disaster from the very start. The bottle of dye, for some reason, kept spurting in different directions, first almost landing toxic hair product directly in my eyeball, — I just now remember telling Gaia, “Thank God I wasn’t blinded forever!” while holding a warm washcloth over my swollen eye — and then almost on Bambi, Gaia’s dog, a butterfly Chihuahua, with literally the best attitude out of any dog I’ve ever met.
Gaia’s hair dried, and I rinsed off my eyebrow bleach, and Gaia and I looked at each other, and both of our hearts sank. Not even Justin Bieber’s voice, 2 pints of ice cream, and a little bit of red wine could mask the errors of my amateur cosmetic skills — my eyebrows were orange, and her hair was really fucked up. Parts of her head were spotty and orange, and others were completely bleached out. On one sideburn, there was a spot of bleach, making it look like she’d shaved a small portion of hair above her ear.
“I’m so… sorry,” I told Gaia. I felt so, so sorry for ruining her hair. She forgave me, luckily. Probably because I looked like a clown with orange eyebrows, and who can be mad at that?
I made the really panicked, and somewhat inappropriate call to Insta-DM Sal Salcedo, a hairstylist, whom I once I wrote about for his “impeccable” skillz, the only guy I’d trust to save me. At 11:40 PM.
Sal, angel that he is, responded to me quickly and very appropriately, saying:
“Holy shit! That’s crazy!”
He invited us to come into the salon, Ramirez Tran in Beverly Hills the next day, promising that he, and his colleague, a colorist named Cherin Choi could fix us right up. And fix us up, they did.
The next day, we arrived at the salon at 1:30 p.m., and didn’t leave until 8:00 o’clock that night. When I saw Sal, we both burst out laughing at my folly, and then he introduced us to Cherin Choi, who is probably the coolest-looking person I’ve ever met. I mean, check out how cute they are:
And check out the magic they were able to do with Gaia’s hair, after 8 laborious hours of fixing my mistakes.
A photo posted by Gaïa Matisse (@gmatisse) on
“I’m not going to lie to you,” Cherin had said slowly, upon examining Gaia’s hair when she sat down. “You really fucked her up.”
Gaia and I hit the town after, psyched on our new looks. That’s right, bleaching my brows orange didn’t deter me from my original desire to rock a robot-alien look this week. Cherin bleached my brows to a pale yellow, and explained to me that there would be a lot of maintenance to my look. The dark hairs have already started growing in, but IDGAF. Clearly. She said as soon as I get over my bleached brows, the cool part is that all I need to do is start coloring them in with a brown shadow; apparently they’ll naturally pick the color up and stay that way.
When will I tire of my new look, though? Probably when retrograde is over, and I come to my senses.
Please excuse my broken phone camera for the blurry iPhone photos.
