Root Cause

On the runway and the red carpet, hair color upkeep hastakena downturn. Hanna Han: skips the salon and gets real on regrowth.

I have been bleaching my hair a solid, uninterrupted blond—not brassy, not gray, but a shade of pure peroxide, like Barbie or Pamela Anderson—since 2002, when I persuaded a friend to lovingly paint my entire head with a packet of drugstore powder bleach and let it cook. My scalp burned and itched. Inches of my hair snapped off, but the result was glorious. It was unnatural, and unkempt, and radical—a kind of imperfect perfection that rebelled against the glossy-lipped, high-definition, pseudo-real pop world that MTV was peddling at the time. I didn’t want to slip into a pair of leather chaps like Christina Aguilera; I wanted the ’70s grit of Debbie Harry.

Despite my decades-long desire for nonconformity, I always feel a bit of anxiety when I see that reverse skunk-streak of thick, dark chestnut emerge from my part.  I don’t mind a bit of regrowth—just enough to recall my grunge-kid past—but I still return to the bleach bottle with regularity. So you can imagine my delight when our current arbiters of youth and style took on the unspoken rules of touch-ups.