Not so Natural

I hate coloring my hair. I've been doing it for over a decade, and it never gets any easier. I tried having it professionally done but that failed for a couple of reasons. 1) My hair grows fairly quickly, and there is a visible line between the colored hair and new growth, more so than when I'd do it myself, when the roots are more gradually mixed in with the colored hair. This means I have to go back as early as 4 weeks for touchups, which is both annoying and expensive. 2) I've had bad luck getting the right haircolor out of professional hairdressers. Either I'm incapable of describing what I want, or they simply like to go overboard, but I've come home, $100 poorer, with orangey hair and burgundy hair. For $10, I can buy a box of the color I know I like and do it myself.

But, somehow, no matter how much experience I've had doing it, I can't manage a coloring session without splattering hair color somewhere undesirable. The shower curtain, throw rug, toilet seat. The white door in my bathroom sink cabinet has a long brown streak that I didn't notice until after it dried and set. There are a couple of dark brown patches in the wood floor in the hallway outside my bathroom. (This is mostly because the color comes out of the bottle a very light brown/white, not very visible, but then turns a richer dark brown with time.)

The upshot of all of this is that I wind up walking around with gray roots for much longer than I'm happy with, because I dread getting back into the bathroon and pulling on those thin rubber gloves. And yet, I'm way too young to give up and go gray.