For the Love of Eduardo

One of my friends decided to dye her hair blonde one day for no apparent reason.  I immediately had visions of orange.  In this day and age, girls' hair color seems to be another accessory, which they change every season as one color becomes fashionable and others leave the arena.

Now, many friend, I'll call her "Geraldine", gave no particular reason for wanting to change her hair color from her natural, honey color to beach blonde.  But I have my suspicions.  Around that time, Geraldine was interested in a certain boy (I'll call him Eduardo) and Eduardo wasn't interested.  Geraldine REALLY liked Eduardo and immediately assumed that if she changed her look from "Geraldine" to "Heidi Montag" Eduardo would become infatuated.  When Geraldine told me of her plan to change her look, I recognized we had two different visions of reality.  Geraldine, dye box in hand, saw herself becoming a beach babe.  I saw pumpkin colored hair that had often reared its head on other girls' manes throughout my teenage experience. 



Thankfully, mercifully, Geraldine's parents discovered her plan and stopped all talk of blonde hair.

Curious to know why girls continually changed their hair color, I decided to talk to a hair stylist.  She told me that when she asked teenaged girls why they wanted to dye their hair, their first response was to insult their own hair.  What the hair stylist gathered from further talking to the girls was the underlying need to be pretty, to be accepted and loved spurred girls to dye their hair.  Most of them said that their friends had all dyed their hair and now the other girls wanted the same color.  This is because, as teenage girls, if you stand out, you are targeted by nasty comments that you hear from other people talking about you.

Eduardo isn't worth it.  Beyond being extremely awful for your hair, dyeing it rips you of your personal identity.  In a world where girls are fed media-images, where self-esteem is so fragile, this popularity of the dye is another facet in the incompleteness of the women's equality movement.  In a brief overview of American society, one can see that the women's equality movement shouldn't be limited to third world countries and the eradication of religious fanaticism.  Our obsession with the way women look has led this society to be as much need of women's equality than ever.

Geraldine thought making her hair a different color would make Eduardo turn his head.  Thank goodness it didn't, because if it had, Geraldine would have been in a relationship with a man who only cared about the way she looked, not the kind of person she is.  But Geraldine's idea underlines an entire society of girls and women who desperately alter their appearance in an attempt to be beautiful.  This leads to low self-esteem and women who change everything about them, defeating the purpose of women's equality.

If you look closely, you will see that these women are, indeed, the same Heidi Monatg.  This is the result of societal pressure to be "beautiful", for men and for others' opinions.