Czech women spend their money on 5 things: hair care, manicures, cigarettes, clothes and food. In that order. My list looks more like: food, chocolate, wine, beer and workout t-shirts. Last Saturday however, I became a fully-functioning Czech lady-citizen and spent some money on hair care. (I was a bit disappointed that there wasn't a Czech lady-citizen ceremony, but I couldn't find a number to call to tell them that I was taking the oath.)

Apparently working for IBM and moving half-way around world has taken its toll on my golden locks and I am way more gray on-top than I would care to admit. So I checked around to see about recommended places and prices to un-gray myself. Turns out there aren't many english speaking hair-dudes within the hair-dude community and not surprisingly, they can charge what they like. A typical hair-cut and dye job is priced at about the same as a full kidney transplant in most 1^st world nations. And while the Czech women and their expat lady friends can live with these prices I had a very hard time justifying them.

So whats a gal to do, you ask? Well you go to your local hypermarket and you buy the Salon-in-a-Box. For the equivalent of $8 CAD, you can get a fully-functioning Loreal #15 brown, do it yourself dye (or perhaps 'die') kit. Daring I admit, but really who would notice if I showed up as a purple headed enablement leader? Most of my work is with the male population in Eastern Europe and lets face it most men wouldn't notice and many of the women here have purple hair anyway so it wouldn't be a problem.

So come Sunday afternoon, I locked myself and Caroline into our upstairs bathroom and opened the box. That wasn't even hard. The box came with one set of gloves, 2 or 3 tubes of stuff and a container for mixing. What the box didn't come with was english instructions. After staring at the pictures where the smiling, maicured lady demonstrated how to do this, neither Caroline or I were any further ahead. And since the iactual written nstructions didn't mention the words for butter, chocolate or beer I decided that google translate would have to be deployed.

So off to the computer we went and I typed in the first sentence from the instructions:

MAKE SURE YOU WEAR THE GLOVES it screamed. How bad is this stuff I screamed, if you have to wear the gloves. IN THE VERY FIRST SENTENCE.

The next set of instructions weren't so straight forward. This is what I got from Google:

Apply the rest of the remaining 2-3 cm shemesh co y of the Incas and the roots.

So according to Google, the box was supposed to contain an Inca.  I automatically assumed it was an Inca warrior who would dye my hair for me while gently massaging my scalp with his strong warrior hands. (well, perhaps I made that last part up, but the Inca part is at least true). Nonetheless, we were really hoping to go back into the bathroom and find the warrior awaiting his assignment. But no. Nothing but a couple of wet towels and Bailey the Dog wondering what all the fuss was about.

At any rate, we felt we knew enough to start the process. So Caroline carefully mixed the appropriate tubes of brown gunky stuff into the test tube like container and we let it sit for a few minutes so that it was properly absorbed. And then it really did turn purple. And smelled so much like ammonia that my nostrils were burning. Once again I found myself wondering how bad is this stuff really? Oh, and did I mention the mixture was now full on purple? Not mauve or light purple, but purple. Putting purple ammonia on my scalp wasn't sounding all that pleasing with or without the warrior. But I decided to go ahead anyway – afterall, $8 is $8.

OMG. It was just like being in the Lord of Rings where gollum finds the ring and screams “it burns us, it burns us”. But at least my hair wasn't turning purple; it was indeed brown as advertised. Although probably not as brown as it could have been as there was no way I was keeping that stuff on my head for the recommended length of time. So as soon as possible I rinsed out the ammonia and lathered my head with polysporen instead of the conditioner it called for. Turns out that polysporen has many conditioner like properties so this wasn't a bad idea at all and it soothed the 3^rd degree burns.

And finally, after all was said and done, I went back to google to type in the rest of the instructions to see if we had done something like mixed the wrong stuff together. What I got back from Google was this:

Grind can pass the final quantity evenly enough to pee the whole length of hair. 

So I obviously didn't do anything wrong and it wasn't even ammonia after all but plain old pee. Which makes sense when I think about it cause the bathroom did smell for quite a while like a hundred cats had peed on my head.

Which probably explains why Bailey kept visiting us.