The big problem when you're blonde...

Let me start with a revealing confession: I'm actually not really blonde. Yes, I know; this goes deep. And far. It took me years to get used to the idea. And even then, I can sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and think: what was it again? Or I have nightmares about Donatella.

Once I was Scandinavian blonde, but I was five or so then. After that, my hair kept getting darker. Around my thirtieth, my hairdresser jokingly put some highlights in, and everyone knows: once you start that, there's no turning back. From that moment on, I fell into the category of fake blonde. And that wasn't always easy for me. Once I asked the hairdresser to dye my hair my own color, and that was once, but never again. I turned into a sort of office mouse. And not even the kind that turns into a femme fatale by night, but really very, very boring. Since that traumatic experience that lasted three days, I have been blonde forevah, and I won't stop dyeing until I'm eighty. No idea how my own hair color has developed in the meantime, but I believe it's now somewhere between indeterminate brown and grayish dark blonde with a gray hair (the horror) here and there.

Fortunately, this seems to be a very normal phenomenon. Only five percent of the world population is blonde, and of that, an even smaller percentage stays blonde. The reason you get darker over the years has to do with pigment-producing genes that become increasingly active. And a lot of pigment means dark hair.

“A bottle with cheeky-looking sixties people is not coming into my bathroom.”

But if you thought this was already a first world problem, you should hear this: that bleached hair turns yellow all the time. Yes, three weeks after a dye job, my hair has the color of a Playmobil figure, and I don't need to tell you that that's not a pretty sight. A solution for this seems to be washing your hair with silver shampoo. But you surely don't think I can handle that mentally? I mean: silver shampoo is shampoo for gray hair! A bottle with cheeky-looking sixties people is not coming into my bathroom.

Fortunately, there are Australians who just understand this problem and have developed a wonderful shampoo for yellow-haired people like me. Keep my Colour Blonde Shampoo from Eleven Australia is that. This cruelty-free shampoo has a blue base that gives your blorange head the coveted ‘cool tones of the typical Aussie blonde’.

It's a bit shocking: the shampoo is bright blue. But how happy I am with my new smurf friend!