The Color of my Hair or Hair, Part 2

But on to the color of my hair (the whole reason for starting this short Hair series)

I have always been dark-haired. As a child,

Gotta start brushin' early!

as a 'tween',

as a teen,

at college,

Look how very brown that hair is! Is it black like my head scarf? No. Much closer in color to my brown shirt.

and up until now. I have never dyed it--not even with henna, although I wonder now and again if it might be fun to have it gleam blue or purple in the sun...

From Temple to Temple, 5k in Provo

A high school friend, C, had similarly very dark brown hair. I was astonished when she showed me a child photo of herself with bleach blond hair. She has German ancestry and I've come to realize that this darkening of hair color is rather typical of Germans, even if the color change is not always so dramatic.

My German husband was also very blond as a baby

and now has light brown or dark blond hair. (His mother says that brown hair has red in it, in which case he'd have the latter...although he does have some red beard hairs... :) )

But back to me :). My hair is dark brown. Very dark  brown. At least that's what I've always claimed. However, I've often had people call my hair black. It's not black!

Or is it? If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, is color as well? There are interesting linguistic examples of one country's "green" stop lights being different than another's. (And instead of changing the more blue-green stop lights, they decided to change reality instead..and redefined their version of "green" as "green". Ah, Japan.) Or there's a theory that Homer's calling the sky and water implies that they didn't have names for those shades of blue back then (citation needed..this was a book that my mom checked out from the library for my linguistic husband. That's what you get for having a linguist in the family :) )

Back to the matter at hand: is my hair brown or black? If people see it as black, is it effectively black? It's not stereotypical "Asian" black, but is my hair still black? (And now that I think about "Asian" black, is that even black? Or do we just call it and my hair color "black" to set one end of the spectrum?)

I was very surprised when I received thank you picture from 2nd graders at the end of one of my practica. There was often a person with short curly black hair--and it took me a minute to realize that was supposed to be me!

(upper right) Don't know how well I actually helped with her "wrighting"...
(lower right) She even liked the way I wore my hair!

But look! 2 thought I had brown hair:

Here's another one from a 4th grader last year:

Agreed, my hair and my dad's hair color is darker than the brown of my mom's and siblings', but black?

Although here my mom's hair is looking darker..hm. I'll blame the woodland lighting.

Are our eyes--is our perception limited by our box of crayons? If the children had had more shades of brown, would they have seen my hair as a different color? **(see foot note)

Just yesterday I was visiting a friend and suggested to her daughter, who wanted to hang with us instead of go play in her room, that she draw a picture of my longer curly mane. Here's the result:

And yes, I was wearing a red shirt (see below)..although I was also wearing pants...wonder where they got off to? My friend with 7 fingers also had hair + not so many fingers..ah well :)

I then took a picture of my hair last night to show that indeed my hair was flat on top and curly on the sides, as depicted above

Got to brush those pearly whites!

--esp. as I shook my curls yesterday in demonstration of my mane.

**Foot note**
This reminds me of a Family Group discussion from several years ago about racism. One woman said she had worked for years to not pay attention to skin--esp. darker skin--color and be affected by it. She felt success as one day a coworker called her "colorblind". She also spoke of seeing more than just "black skin", but rather shades like chocolate skin, cinnamon skin, etc. Our typical Western box of crayons is not enough to adequately portray this diversity.