Blake Davenport

As long as I can remember, I've had a sick fascination with American blonds. Old-movie classics were how this Iranian-American immigrant learned English—my early diary entries are full of mid-Atlantic-accented leading-lady coos like "Ain't life grand!" and "Golly!" Between AMC and the wonderful local indie video store in the greater Los Angeles enclave of South Pasadena, California, where I grew up, my psyche was firmly molded by eras past. I'd take Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Jean Harlow, and Betty Grable over sitcom ingenues and Tiger Beat fare any day. But when I'd pose with a black crayon dangling from my lips, draped in my aunt's furs, tangled in costume jewelry, I always knew I was playing someone I was not.

I was no blond.

By my teenage years, I'd given up starlet drag. In the '90s, I lusted after a different type of iconic blond—the Kurt-and-Courtney white-hot grunge blond; Kat Bjelland's Babes in Toyland wackadoodle baby-doll blond; Kim Gordon's effortless X-girl introvert blond—but none of these were quite me either. The first feminine icon I aspired to realistically look like was Dil of The Crying Game, a wiry, scrawny, dark-haired It Girl who—um, spoiler—was really a man. PJ Harvey and Lisa Bonet were my only brunette iconoclast icons of sexiness. With my mustache, unruly eyebrows, and beanpole physique, I tried to convince myself I was keeping it real. That brunette meant the smarty-pants, the outcast, the weirdo, the rebel. I never dared to touch blond's pageant-queen mainstream.

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The other issue was my mother. To this day I've seen my mother's natural hair color only in old photos; apparently it was once jet-black like mine. I've also rarely seen my mother without makeup, perhaps only when I've glimpsed her fresh out of a shower. My mother is the kind of woman who wears lipstick to the pool, who suffocated the one yoga class I took her to in Chanel No. 5, who once told me she'd commit suicide when her looks went. In the '80s, she'd L'Oréal the full spectrum of red and yellow, from copper to bronze to gold to platinum and back again, the long, feathered, perfect hair that she spent hours on daily accepting every whim. Her appearance was her main object, the one link and key to acceptance that she carried from Iran to the U.S. Never mind that she'd dropped several tiers of social class in the transition, from growing up in a mansion in Tehran's wealthiest district to now helming a family of four in a tiny two-bedroom apartment in the lower-middle-class neighborhood of South Pasadena. She could make stonewashed imitation Guess? jeans from J.C. Penney look just as elegant as the YSL suits of her Tehran twenties, procured during family shopping trips to Italy and France. Who was I to compete with that? She'd chase me around the house brandishing lipstick and tweezers, and threaten my hair with goo, all while remaining a beauty mystery to me: the ghost of popular-girl future, the foxy lady all my scrappy guy friends would turn into perfect princes around, a paragon of soap-star impeccability.

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Of course, it now makes sense to me why her hair was always something blondish—in Los Angeles, not only did the Dumb Blond of all the jokes reign supreme, but also the Iranian-Americans of Tehrangeles (portmanteau for the West Side neighborhoods that are filled with Iranians) kept to blond bombshelling almost as a rule. Designer black power suits and leather little somethings, gold chains and giant rocks, stilettos and red lipstick, or perhaps something frosted—but always topped off by big hair even Dallas wouldn't do, often a very expensive shade of flaxen. Just as nose jobs were a thing, so too was hair that was at the very least heavily highlighted. Maybe it was truly an Iranian fascination—I recall my professor father once trying to jus-tify, a bit grumpily, that in ancient Persia, kings would place gold dust and thread in their beards and hair, which was often already orange-gold with henna.

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In any case, I decided that with my jet-black hair, my curvelessness and tomboyery, I'd have to be the Other to our—and frankly every other—L.A. woman. But they were hard to escape. Even my father's sisters were all about gilded glamour: supermodel tall and thin, art-star socialites who used to traverse Tehran and various European cities dressed in '60s mod, like a Peggy Moffitt/Twiggy/Penelope Tree trio. I couldn't tell you any of their natural hair colors, either—between the three, you had platinum, copper, and a Wonder Woman blue-black. All of them wore minidresses and heavy cat-eye liner all the way into old age. And like my mother, they always looked most themselves when topped with some shade of metal, generally gold.

I was interested in glamour, but I was not interested in being the glamour. I looked to riot grrrl punk and the hair metal of the West Coast for influences—girls whose scruffiness made them sexy, hell-raisers who were too busy causing trouble to be beautiful, whose aura was cheap and whose allure was dirty. I wore flannels, ripped jeans, Doc Martens, slashed tights, T-shirts, all the way till…now. Not much has changed.

Until a couple of months ago, when I went blond.

The truth is, I'd been here before, kinda—it wasn't my first time being bleached, at least. As a study-abroad student at Oxford, I let the small salon in the center of town turn me "cyberpunk china doll," as they called it, which meant my hair was lightened so that red streaks could show. It's just hair, I shrugged, a bit unsure. Six years later, at the salon Art + Science in Chicago, they shaved half my head, bobbed the other half, and applied unnatural hues in variegated bleached streaks. Just hair, I waved it off. And in 2007, just before my first novel was published, out of the anxiety and frustration of waiting, I walked into New York City's Mudhoney salon on a whim and said I wanted black and white skunk stripes, à la Cruella de Vil.

Never ever did I want to be a full-on bottle blond. But it just so happens that I'm working on a third novel that I'm calling Tehrangeles, largely about the fake-blond Iranian-American hellions of L.A.'s West Side. At some point I decided much of the action would take place in malls, that the cast would be almost all women, and that the hair would be mostly blond—and in fact, in the middle of the book there would be a lengthy meditation on blondness. It was then that the Method-acting aspect of creative writing kicked in—like when I gave myself a Point Break makeover to go undercover for months at a skydiving-cult compound—and I thought, What if I went there for just a month?

It will be for a book! I told people. For research! I needlessly worried about all the people to tell—among them, colleagues, people I teach with. I decided to do it over winter break, when I didn't have to deal with student fascination and raised faculty eyebrows.

It will be for a book! For research! I explained to Aura Friedman, the one and only hairdresser I consulted, at Sally Hershberger Downtown. Her name was the one that came up again and again as the go-to for black-to-blond transitions, her magic having transformed unnatural blonds such as MIA and Lady Gaga.

Aura ran her hands through my nearly waist-length black hair. Her first question: What was virgin, and what wasn't? I'd had some straightening treatments and mild ombré at one point, and so she recommended a dramatic chop. At this, I barely blinked. Then we discussed color. Before I could even get into what I thought would work best for me—the icy white blond with black eyebrows of Who's That Girl–era Madonna; the type of girls in all-black Alaïa with red lipstick, for example—Aura was already saying platinum. It's a thing this season, after all—just look at Rita Ora, Iggy Azalea, and Beyoncé, not to mention numerous models like Soo Joo Park and Charlotte Carey, both of whom are Aura devotees. Aura saw it as a no-brainer: "It's a strong look. The blond can be toned to fit almost every skin tone."

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It took eight and a half hours. "I've been coloring hair for 20 years, and my experience has been that if I use a higher volume—stronger product one time and avoid a reapplication of bleach—the hair ends up lighter and is left stronger," Aura told me. "The more you reapply bleach to the hair, the weaker it will get." So we went with what she called a "standard virgin bleach application method": She applied a cream bleach, which she told me would be less abrasive than a powder, from about a quarter inch to an inch (depending on my hair's thickness) away from the scalp down to the ends.

When I emerged, I was white blond, more platinum than I ever could have imagined. The biggest shocker was that I was also still me—that it was, in fact, nothing like the Tehrangelina muses that I wanted to write about. Mine was the almost androgynous silver of old '90s Nadja Auermann and Kirsty Hume that Agyness Deyn and Robyn also took on a decade or so later. It was punk blond, a weird-bird blond, and therefore, more than ever maybe, a very me blond.

So me, in fact, that it was apparently still literary-me: Until that moment, I had no idea I'd channeled another muse of mine, one I'd finished writing about well over a year earlier—Zal, the protagonist of my second novel, The Last Illusion. He's based on a character in a Persian myth from the Book of Kings, Iran's national medieval epic about a young boy banished to the wilderness for his white skin and hair, and eventually raised by a bird. In the book, my protagonist is an asexual, feral Iranian boy, born with a disease like albinism, who comes of age in 9/11-era New York City. His white skin and white-blond hair horrify his birth mother, who raises him in a cage with her dozens of pet birds. I was now my Bird Boy.

Or was I? Was I even one of my Tehrangeles girls? Was this for the book? For research?

Goodbye, control. With blond, you become a thing people react to—often very strongly. There were many compliments, usually from female strangers or gay males. Everyone has an opinion when you're blond; it's like having a puppy or baby on you: conversation-piece alert! My mother, ironically, writes me every few weeks to ask when I will dye it back to its "beautiful black."

But the reactions it sparked, especially from men, told me that the boldness of the experiment caused as much fuss as the reality of the color. On Facebook I posted a photo that led several "friends" (men I don't know, who I'd accepted as potential fans of my writing) to melt down about it, accusing me of "whitewashing." I tried to tell them going blond was the most Iranian thing I'd ever done, but they didn't get it—and while I found it mostly funny, I also wanted to scream, "Why can't you understand that I went all-the-way unnatural precisely to fool no one?!" In my Harlem neighborhood, I was also surprised. Looking out-there in this sartorially flamboyant place usually goes rewarded, but one neighbor said he thought I'd joined Witness Protection; another asked if I was okay, because "you look like you had a breakdown." Worst of all was the crazy cab ride where my brown driver kept going on about loving white women and especially blonds and I did not realize he was trying to pick me up because I don't identify as one; he was horrified to learn I was Iranian and very much a brown woman when I finally showed him my very brunette driver's- license photo. Horrified.

In spite of all the madness, now into month two, I feel a bit attached to the blond. For one thing, my intensely frizzy black hair feels healthier. (I ask Aura about this, and the reason seems obvious to her: "Your hair is so coarse that the bleach actually softens it.")

But it's also, very surprisingly, allowed me to be myself: the blond as a freak of nature. I've never been someone who has felt comfortable blending in. And so it interests me that blondness apparently came from a genetic mutation 11,000 years ago in the last Ice Age, and that only 2 percent of the world's adult population are natural blonds.

Blond as oddity, blond as exception to the rule, blond as another Other—these concepts resonated with me. In fact, in my first Facebook post about it, I'm wearing clear Warby Parker glasses and a cardigan, announcing that I feel more " '90s Olympia librarian" than anything. I feel more interesting than I do more beautiful or more sexy; in fact, I don't doubt I looked more attractive with my natural hair. It's comical to me to even play it up with the all-black clothes and red lipstick I imagined living in—"the color of deception" and "love devastation" of INXS's "Suicide Blonde" was far more my spirit back when I was brunette; that kind of fast-and-loose Bond Girl sexiness I somehow aspired to more with my natural dark hair. Perhaps blond has reminded me I can't change who I am—"What you are picks its way," said Whitman, a favorite line that I plucked for my senior quote in 1996, a time when I was desperate to know just what it was I was.

The less I understand myself these days and the less I even count "containing multitudes"—hello, Whitman again!—the more at peace I am with all my many disconnected pieces. And blond is baffling and full of contradictions, even in its most classical contemporary archetypes. Blond has always been more than just an American fascination—it is in Eastern cultures as well, of course; the harajuku girls of Japan are just one of many recent phenomena—but I think part of it has been its inherent surrealism. Blond, after all, photographs a lot better than it feels, and the blond-maintenance regimen basically nixes bedhead and sexhead to nada (at one point, Aura's assistant Lucille told me to remind men they can't hair-pull in bed or it will all break). It's expensive, it's luxurious, it's time-consuming, it's absurd, it fools no one. The blond of feminists like my beloved writer Kathy Acker was in dialogue with that—women owning their countenance, the modern female as something outside of her usual realm in nature. That blond—cleverly confusing, resoundingly contrarian—was one I could get behind now that I'm in my midthirties, with a whole lot of living behind me, feeling stronger and more confident than ever.

And when you're a child playing dress up, part of the safety is knowing everyone can see through you, that it's a game. But somehow as grown-ups we try to conjure fantasy in all the wrong ways, desperately clinging to mass-produced reality. The great thing about extremely artificial and overtly outre personas is you go back to that childhood game, and get to linger in the lovely oddness of transparency, a move made not by need but by want, leaving them guessing, like the sourceless mystery of a stray wink—at who knows what exactly.

This article appeared in the May 2014 issue of ELLE magazine.

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