For as long as I’ve had complete control over the way I look, I’ve been trying to go blonde. When I was 15, a friend and I bleached my hair using dye from a box four times over the course of a weekend, and when my mum got home from her business trip, all sorts of shit went down. Once it had been patched up with yet another bleach job (again, from a box!) we all ended up loving it, and for years afterwards she kept encouraging me to go back to that colour.

But of course, I wasn’t actually blonde. For the first part I was light ginger, and then for a year and a half after that, I was luminous yellow. Honestly, my boyfriend at the time nicknamed me ‘lighthouse,’ and would shout it down school corridors to get my attention. After that I went back to brunette, swinging wildly between far-too-dark and peeking-ginger-tinges until my hair just about got back to it’s natural colour.

Along came uni, and out came the bleach again. Once more I returned to highlighter yellow, before getting sick of the upkeep and going brown again. Nowadays I try to stick to being a brunette, but my hair has a habit of being bleached by the sun at an alarming rate, so I spend most of my time as a bizarre shade of orangey-brown, through no fault of my own.

At Christmas I paid alot of money to ‘go lighter’ and just ended up ginger with slightly lighter ginger highlights. I hated it, and after a few weeks I dyed over it, horrified at the thought of my £6 brown box dye undoing £75+ worth of salon work in just 30 minutes.

Recently I’d been toying with leave-in bleaching gels (a bit like Sun-In, but less 90’s) now that the last lot of brunette dye has faded beyond almost all recognition, but that, once again, left me more orange than Orange County. Turns out, maybe I’m just not meant to be blonde. But I’m a sucker for thinking that ‘”this time it’ll work!”

On Thursday night I admitted defeat and dyed over my bleaching attempts with yet another box of brown dye. And I’ve decided I’m done with blonde. If it hasn’t worked out yet, it never will, so I’m giving up on that venture and sticking with what I know.