Janelle Schoenberg of White Bear Lake, Minnesota, succeeded in dying her hair from strawberry blond to platinum blond last weekend. While the color change transformed her look, she was dismayed to discover that her face remained the same.
“I was going for a totally new look. How am I supposed to start a new chapter in my life if my face looks the same?” asks Schoenberg, whose legally blind cat still recognizes her by smell but is markedly less affectionate.
“My hair looks nicer, but my face is still puffy and tired-looking,” says Schoenberg. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
She adds, “If my hair is shiny and cute, why isn’t my face?”
Given the transformation gap between Schoenberg’s intended degree of change and the familiarity of the face she still sees in the mirror after getting out of the shower with wet hair, Schoenberg has been forced to come up with alternative methods of making her face nicer. On a dry-erase board in her living room, she has brainstormed a list of facial-improvement ideas, which include:
-Move to a new city
-Get all new underwear and socks!
-Go vegan!
-Go paleo!
-Do bulletproof coffee!
-Consume only Spanish-language media for a while
-Start smoking
-Then, quit smoking
-Cut hair (again)
-Dye hair (again)
-Get a tattoo
-Buy a fixed-gear bike
-Woodworking class
-Moisturizer???
“Maybe my expectations were too high for what a cut-n-color could accomplish,” says Shoenberg, poking her forehead with the ends of her new bangs in the hopes that some of the niceness would transfer to her skin. Still, Schoenberg is not yet ready to move to the most extreme last option (“Moisturizer???”) on her board. “I’m not into that whole ‘go after what you want’ thing,” she explains. “I don’t want to come off as too intense.”
Despite the fact that people still recognize her face, Schoenberg expressed relief that it took longer for people to recognize her than it did before she dyed her hair.
“That’s something,” she says. “People will stare and then say, ‘Oh! I didn’t recognize you for a second.’ Well—I want to take that second and extend it for a lifetime. I just found out that eyebrow tinting is a thing, so I just made an appointment for Friday.”
