I was late to the Game of Thrones [1] party. I was so late that I had to binge watch six seasons in three weeks to catch up before the season seven [2] premiere. And watching all of that GoT in so little time got me dangerously hooked — it was all I could talk about, all I could think about. When Halloween [3] rolled around, I had no doubt about who I wanted to be: Daenerys Stormborn of the House Targaryen [4], First of Her Name, the Unburnt, Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Khaleesi of the — well, you get it.
I could have bought a wig. I thought about buying some platinum color spray that would wash out the next day. But when I was perusing the aisles of the drugstore, I decided that I wanted to fully commit: I would bleach my dirty blond hair Khaleesi white [5].
I had an ulterior motive — I've always wanted to go platinum [6], but with my thick, dark eyebrows, I wasn't sure I could pull it off. There was the matter of upkeep, too, and that wouldn't be cheap. The temporality of the costume gave me both a motive and an excuse. I did it because Halloween. And if it looked bad, blame Halloween. I eyed the smug model on the box with her long, flaxen waves. You better not be playing me, I thought.
I'd never done a home dye [8] before, so I read the instructions meticulously before I strapped on my plastic gloves and got to work mixing and applying. I let the formula sit in my hair while my fiancé and I watched Netflix. He kept shooting me nervous glances. "How long are you supposed to keep that stuff in your hair?" he kept asking. I assured him that it was fine, that I knew what I was doing, that there was nothing to worry about it. Then, when my timer went off, I returned to the bathroom to rinse.
I don't think I need to tell you it looked bad. It looked worse than bad — it looked orange, Chuckie Finster orange. I shrieked. I immediately saturated my scalp with another layer of dye. I waited. I rinsed. This time, layers of orange and yellow appeared like a Rothko painting. I applied another layer to my roots, which were still ruddy brown in comparison to the rest. It burned. The result: a thick, stiff mess of cornflower yellow that I could barely coax into a ponytail, much less get a brush through. I was so distraught that my fiancé couldn't even get much pleasure from his "I told you so."
I made my hair work for my costume with an entire bottle of silver hair spray, but that didn't quite compensate for the three subsequent months I spent with crayon yellow hair. After trying several different purple toning shampoos [9] and unsuccessfully trying to convince myself that it had faded into a more agreeable shade of blond (it hadn't), I got myself to a salon, ready to face the music. "What in the world did you do to yourself?" the stylist asked.
"Halloween," I explained.
She didn't have to tell me not to try a home bleach again; we both knew I wouldn't. It only took a few hours to transform my hair shade into a nice, far more natural-looking strawberry blond, but I only have to look at a picture from my butchered self dye attempt to remind myself why I will always leave my hair to the professionals.