$5 highlights

Being young and married certainly has its advantages. Larger tax break and automatic off campus housing aside, life is such an adventure at this stage and I feel blessed to have an amazing travel companion. However, it has also come with a fair share of obstacles. Boys can create some pretty smelly odors, and we do have to keep a close watch on our budget. This last factor is tough on me sometimes (read: all the stinking time) when I want things that I don’t need. Case in point: highlighting my hair since I was 15 years old has cost me approximately $1750. Ouch. Something had to be done but I REFUSE to quit cold turkey and have a straight line of bright blond v. roots growing out for the next dozen years.Solution one: dye my hair back to natural, boring, lame, generic “dirty blond”(professionally). Cost: $45 Result: My hair is exactly 28 shades darker than anything that naturally grows out of my head and my skin looks alabaster next to it. I start using a darker color of foundation.After 4 weeks of listening to me complain every morning about how “my hair does NOT look natural” and the fact that “it totally washes me out”, Dan conceives a possibly nightmarish situation:Solution two: we buy a boxed highlight kit and Dan becomes my life-long hair stylist. Cost: $5 on sale. Result: Not bad! He is so precise and meticulous about everything, and he did a pretty good job. The color of the highlights is a 7 on a scale of 10, but hey – for less than the cost of 2 grande chai tea lattes, I absolutely can’t complain.By the way, don’t tell Dan’s guy friends that he dabbles in hairstyling.