Hi, my name is Hitomi Ozama and I have a love-hate relationship with my hair. Ever since elementary school, my hair has been an important feature of my life. For instance, sometime in 3rd grade, an older friend of mine, claimed that I looked exactly like a character she had seen on tv. All except the character she had claimed I resembled had bangs. Therefore, she took it upon herself to cut the front of my hair with safety scissors into extremely short bangs, and my very impressionable 3rd-grade self let her do so. At the moment, I thought I looked like the coolest kid in the world. But now that I look back on it, I must have looked like a knock-off Dora the Explorer. Since then, I had always been fighting with my hair. Some years, I wanted to cut it really short, and other years I regretted that I cut it really short. But ever since 3rd grade, I always wore my familiar and comfortable side-swept bangs, until I made the worst decision of my life.

After graduating high school, my hair had grown well past my waist. I was feeling really generous at the time and I wanted to donate my hair to an organization that made wigs for people that lost hair due to cancer. So then I cut my hair all the way up to my shoulders and gave it all to charity. Everything was going well until I decided that I wanted to change my hairstyle even more. I had seen a whole bunch of cool hair colors on my Pinterest and the one that caught my eye the most was the pastel pink colored hair. However when the day came to dye my hair, one of the boxes that I did not carefully read, turned out to be permanent hair dye. For some insight, semi-permanent hair dye can be put directly onto your hair, but for permanent hair dye, you must dilute it before placing it on your hair. Because I didn’t read that box carefully, I put permanent pink hair dye directly onto my hair. The next time I came out of the shower and looked in the mirror, I screamed. The permanent hair dye did not turn my hair a soft pastel pink, but instead a bright glowing neon pink.

Since then, I decided that it would be best if I never tried to do my own hair again and just leave it to the professionals. The permanent neon pink eventually very slowly started to fade out of my hair, although it can still be seen on parts of my head, and my roots have also grown quite a bit. For now, I think it’s best for my hair to just let it be and take a break. But still, I know that eventually, I will continue my never-ending fight with my hair.