Does This Magazine Make Me Look Fat?

Today was not my day for beauty and no amount of inner glow was going to make me feel better about the hair that was stuck to my head.

I had a little snafu yesterday in what should have been a simple color touch-up. For those that know me, I love to play with hair color. Sometimes a little touch of red, sometimes a few blonde highlights. Just depends on what the mood is.

It's summer and I've decided to move lighter in the shades and found a color with highlights I just love. While multi-tasking yesterday, I inadvertently grabbed my winter hair color. No problem, after it was done I just grabbed my summer hair color and then did the highlights. But thanks to the varying base colors now in my hair, the highlights didn't turn out like they should have. So I thought I could just start over with the lighter base color.

As I've now found out, the more color you add (even lighter colors), the darker your hair becomes. By morning, my hair was just about jet black and definitely NOT what I was hoping for. So off to the salon I head so I can pay someone to get me into the hair color I had when I woke up yesterday morning.

So when I entered the salon in my baggy pants, loose t-shirt, zero make-up and hair that I wasn't feeling the love for, I wasn't feeling all pretty-like. Hell, I couldn't have faked it if my life depended on it! To make matters worse, while waiting for my hair-savior (stylist) I opened up one of those hip fashion magazines. There staring back at me were tall, skinny, young models with perfectly colored hair, beautiful spiked heals and wearing the latest and greatest in clothing that is well-above the Kohl's price range I normally shop in.

To add insult to injury, they didn't have a single piece of dog hair weaved into their fancy clothing (in contrast to my life-style which means I'm always accompanied by dog hair of all colors).

In my hair-weakened state, I found myself thinking "I want to be that skinny", "I want my hair done up like that", "oh those dreamy shoes" and all kinds of envious stuff. Even the Venus razor ad with her beautiful legs had me turning green.

And then I found myself mentally calculating all of my flaws. I hadn't shaved my legs since Saturday. There was no way my practical feet were going to stand 20 minutes in those 5" heels. The hair was a completely lost cause and this 5'2" vertically challenged girl was never going to have long, tall, lean legs no matter how hard I worked out or how long I stayed on a stretching rack.

Now tell me again why we have these magazines that feature fake people, shown in borrowed homes, wearing clothing with price tags that add up to a house payment, in hairstyles that require 10 pounds of hair product and a small monthly loan just to afford them?

Dang it, I almost fell for the marketing machine techniques which tell me that if I buy Product X, Y and Z, I'll have everything I never knew I was missing. Luckily I put the magazine down. I confidently walked over to my SuperCuts salon gal who is a treasure (Yes, I'll admit that I used to go to a top-notch salon and pay almost $200 for a cut & color). My gal worked her magic and by the time I walked out of there (with a brow wax to boot!), I was feeling pretty, pretty, pretty! Hell, I even came home and threw on a little make-up to go teach my dog classes.

As an added bonus to my now normal base color, I have some wicked blonde highlights that lighten up my mood as well as my hair. I have to say, I'm feeling the spark again and I've vowed NOT to open up one of the damned magazines again! Those things are BAD for your health!