I’ve always wanted to be like Courtney Love, all bedhead and last-night makeup. The home bleach job and chemical cut can only last so long before your already fine hair is past the point of no return. Home blonde is not something to be played with if you are looking for a specific look; it is far more of a spin-of-the-wheel, get-what-you-get, can-I-let-it-sit-another-10-minutes game. After a few cycles of playing with fire this way, deciding to give up and go brunette felt like admitting defeat.

As vapid as it sounds, being blonde has become part of my identity. It feels trivial to speak about hair as if it is an integral part of who we are, but my hair has always felt like a safety blanket, a tie to my femininity and beauty, so to speak. When asked, “What is your natural colour?” I must always respond with “Who knows?” I haven’t seen my fully natural hair since I was fifteen and got my first head of highlights. I will often joke that my hair grows from the root a sharp, tasty cheese bleach-blonde, or a shocking neon pink. So, I ask, who am I now that I am really a brunette?

Hair colour really is just hair colour. But it also manages to shift your perception of self. When someone describes you to an acquaintance, what words do they use? For me, I would say, blonde. It’s hard to deny that it begins to enmesh with your identity. Change anything about yourself that people may notice; it is bound to change the cognisance of your visual identity in a way. I still catch myself in the mirror now, three weeks into not being a blonde, and startle myself: who is that? I would always say, ‘what if I look like a nobody with (what I could best guess is) my natural hair?’, worried that (although I know so many striking brunettes) I would fade into the background, a wash of brown hair and brown eyes, lacking the je ne sais quoi to turn a head.

So far, I haven’t noticed much. I would have predicted to hear every second person, aghast at the stark difference in appearance, wax on about the change and how dramatically different I look, how they couldn’t recognise me in a lineup. Not the case; turns out that that whole blonde identity thing mostly exists in my own head. The day I dyed my hair, my girlfriend called me her ‘brunette girl’; I shuddered, ‘fine, my blonde girl with brown hair’. Much better for some reason.

I might always feel like a blonde, but that is the fallacy of a blonde identity. Getting used to the reflection is more than just what shade of supermarket yellow you can get your hair to in your badly lit bathroom (go to the salon… PLEASE). I can still be like Courtney, all bed-head and last night's makeup, but now, maybe I can embody a Patti Smith (evidently the more sane choice).