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Dye, Dye, My Darling

Bleached blond and Asian

I don’t want to dye … my hair again. Yet everywhere I look Asian and Asian American women are going red, blonde or orange — anything but boring old basic black.

Mainstream women’s magazine ads are pedaling hair color to the Asian American masses — unheard of even a decade ago. In the latest issue of Mademoiselle magazine, check out L’Oreal’s Feria two-pagers for “Heatwave Reds.” A multicultural trio of models, including an Asian woman with a curtain of “Brilliant Bordeaux No. 56,” illustrate “multi-faceted” shades that “won’t wreck or ravage hair.” Several pages later, there’s the Clairol Herbal Essences layout, which features an Asian model with choppy layers and coppery red strands that seem a little too complex and highlight-heavy to be the product of a simple shampoo-in dye job.

It’s edgy. It’s fashion-forward. It’s a whole new exciting market of consumers who will soon be buying, buying, buying every six weeks to touch up their edge.

The irony is that back in the early ’80s, I thought of myself as one of the early punky proponents of the chameleonlike properties of bleach, dye, cellophanes, tints, highlights, you name it. The teenaged me tried to convince a hair stylist to bleach my hair, only to be shot down by that salon storm trooper and told that it would strip and gut my otherwise strong, healthy, dark brown hair, leeching it of all that was good, wholesome, pure and natural. Why the hell would I want to do a thing like that?

I ended up going home with a box of the lightest blonde hue that Clairol’s Nice ’n’ Easy had to offer and shampooed in a kind of brownish-carrot color. It had nowhere near the impact that I yearned for, and I resigned myself to wimp-ass cellophanes, tints and “conditioning” treatments, taking my chastising headcutter’s dire warnings about more extreme bleach jobs to heart.

Now that urge to dye is gone, and I’m perfectly happy with the color of my hair. But that’s for reasons other than my old stodgy stylist: The mainstreaming and commercialization of punk, fringe culture and their accompanying signifiers made me want to run in the opposite direction of all things dyed, tattooed, pierced, scarred and readily available at the modern cookie-cutter fashion mall.

Not surprisingly, the rest of the world isn’t quite ready to go au naturel. My coworkers, Asian or no, come to work in rotating hues of canary yellow, royal blue, apple green. And always the height of visionary fashion — and trendiness — Japanese women’s magazines such as Non-No, An-An and CanCan are crammed with bleached blonde Asian models, as well as L’Oreal advertisements showcasing a Nico-like redhead.

That’s a change from the last time I was in Tokyo about a decade ago. Hard to forget is the sea of black-haired figures coursing through Ginza or Ikebukuro subway station at rush hour. “Everywhere you go, it’s little black heads” was my Japanese American mother’s typical comment. It was visually starkly homogenous, and the few who weren’t dark-headed stood out like sore thumbs — in a bad way, of course.

As “Jean” writes in “The Blondest Hair” from the online zine Blair, most people think that “blonde Asians are freaks. It’s just not natural or glamorous (unless you consider trash glamorous)… It just seems like Asians are only supposed to have black hair and that this is a normal thing. White girls can dye their hair any color they want. Mousy brown one day, stunning blonde the next. Maybe even mouthwatering red! It doesn’t matter. It’s just white girl transforming herself into... white girl! But if an Asian girl goes blonde? Forget it.”

So why dye now? In Japan, the epicenter of fashion trends, does it have anything to do with the still-ravaged Asian economy? Perhaps Japanese kids want to be anything but their fathers: African American hip-hoppers, white trip-hoppers, anything but that little black-headed, suit-and-tie salary guy.

Maybe it has to do with the diffusion of surf culture. One too many trips to Hawaii, one too many days spent roasting in the sun, and what do you get? Orange hair that symbolizes a tropical, decadent, beachy vibe, rather than a punky attitude — but still denotes the antithesis of an uptight, by-the-book work ethic. It says glamour, self-indulgence, leisure. It says, “Because I’m worth it.”

It’s all about creating oneself, carving out a new way of looking and being, as Peggy Orenstein observed in “Parasites in Prêt-a-Porter,” her July 1 New York Times Magazine story about fashion-obsessed, bleached blonde or redhead Japanese career women who refuse to get married. It’s about passing — and confidently playing with society’s acceptance.

“True Colors” — Malcolm Gladwell’s March 22, 1999, New Yorker feature on hair color and the female advertising groundbreakers who played a part in the explosion of the billion-dollar-a-year market — gives the fascinating background on America’s post-war obsession with hair dye and how it was part of the package that women bought as they entered the workplace and battled for social emancipation and sexual power. “They changed their lives and their hair. But it wasn’t one thing of the other. It was both,” Gladwell writes.

It makes sense that as Asian women emerge as economic or social forces in their own right, the way they choose to represent themselves will take on new forms, in direct opposition to the old beauty standards and assumptions. Forums on Asian women’s hair on www.goldsea.com or dyed Asian hair on www.click2asia.com show those aesthetics are expanding.

I wracked my brain for a current woman of color is pushing the envelope on what is acceptable in the bleach business, and the best example I could come up with was Jennifer Lopez in “Angel Eyes” and at the Oscar ceremonies. Now that she’s an undeniable powerhouse in the box office and on the music charts, Lopez is busy working it. Her hair is brassy blonde, she sports a deep orange tan and tops the whole thing with glittery, metallic makeup and pastel ensembles.

The look is a strange, alien, almost monochromatic — she resembles a yellow cake covered with chocolate frosting and tipped with violet icing. It doesn’t look Anglo. It doesn’t look natural. It looks “bad.” But it’s her, or our, “bad” taste.