If you have been grocery shopping at all in the past week you may have noticed something missing from the shelves besides toilet paper and hand sanitizer: hair dye. A growing trend has emerged where teenagers are dyeing their hair while we are all stuck in quarantine, and as amazing as many of my friends look with their new hair, I will not be dyeing my hair ever again. 

It was one week into the summer after seventh grade, and my mom finally caved and took me to get my hair dyed any color that I wanted. I rushed into the salon with her, my iPhone 4 loaded with images of luscious lavender locks that I wanted to be replicated on my own dull mud colored hair. 

Nearly three hours of bleaching and dyeing later, I had purple hair so bright I would have been the envy of troll dolls everywhere. I was thrilled with the outcome and could hardly contain my excitement as my mom drove home to show the rest of my unsuspecting family.

But one week later my joy had dissipated, I had realized that when my hair was being set with heat, it hadn’t gotten hot enough, meaning my once purple hair was quickly decaying into a bleachy bronze. 

It didn’t seem to matter how many times my mother and I re-dyed my hair, by the end of the month I was back to being the color of an Olympic medal, coming in third place against bleach and semipermanent hair color.

By the time eighth grade rolled around I had re-dyed my hair three times, each with short lived periods of success. I was less than excited to be starting the year with hair the color of rotting carrots, but such is life. I can still feel the horror of having a teacher approach me and tell me my hair violated the dress code for “unnatural hair color” despite her own hair being a distinctive bleach blonde. 

That night I went home, borrowed my mother’s jet black hair dye and ended my purple hair tragedy once and for all. I have since spent a large chunk of my time hunting down and deleting all images of my hair in all of its various shades of purple and orange in an attempt to pretend the whole fiasco never happened.

So to everyone who is considering dyeing their hair to pass time in quarantine, I recommend making sure of two things: that you are very careful in following the instructions, and that this is a color you want to be stuck with while salons are closed. And please, stay away from bleach.