Is Going Blonde The Secret to My Success?

“Madam, can you please decide which hair colour would you like to have,” the salon guy asked, thrusting a sheet in front of me with multiple bristles tucked upon it in different colours.

I was lounging in the salon chair, toying with the idea of getting my hair coloured. So far, I had already turned pages of multiple glossy magazines that adorned photographs of smiling faces in different hair colours. They looked so genuinely happy finding the hair colour that they truly wanted. But for me the answer remained elusive.

See, the perfect hair colour is like a unicorn, just as mythical. Usually you fall between  “Are you fucking mad?” or “I can’t see a thing”.  It vacillates as wildly as every other aspect of my life. Throughout my life I have either been “too fat or too thin”, “too flashy or too sombre”, “too young or too old”, “too bossy or too much of a pushover”, “too behenji or too mod”, “too stern or too giggly”. In most cases, the truth lies in between, but women are often put into these extreme buckets.

But hair colour, I figured, I have some control over. That’s when I thought about Google, and quickly punched these words in the phone: “Women leaders and hair colour.” Yipeee! Some very relevant searches popped up on my screen.

1. Why Women Who Want to be Leaders Should Dye their Hair Blonde?
2. Ten Things We Learned by Analysing Global Leadership Hair Colour
3. Why an Outsized Number of Blondes are Leading the Country
4. Hairstyles Successful Women Wear
5. Why are Female CEOs and Senators Disproportionately Blonde?

Now, do you see what I mean? This is real business; hair colour of women has been already made a topic of research. And surprisingly we were never taught about this, or maybe we were, but it got lost in the heaps of instruction given to women on how to walk, talk, dress, behave, work, think, fart, burp, and what not.

See, the perfect hair colour is like a unicorn, just as mythical.

So, without wasting a minute, I quickly typed an email to my MBA school administration office, asking them to explore the option of including a module on hair colours for female students. After all, their success does not depend simply on their calibre or knowledge, the hair colour they flaunt and their style are supposedly equally important.

Now armed with this amazing information, I immediately decided to have my hair done blonde since the colour was “important enough” to become a subject of study: conduct researches, collect data, and publish papers on it. To ensure that my family members recognise me after my makeover – my first step toward becoming a world leader – I called my husband to inform him. He was really supportive and was happy that I have finally found a way to be successful, but then he asked what colour should he dye his hair. I was pretty sure God Google had the answer to that as well. I typed “Male leaders and hair colour” into the search engine this time.

Surprise, surprise. No results popped up. Google could not find anything that could correlate these two life-changing factors. My husband was dejected that men had been excluded from such hard-hitting research. Their recipe for success seemed to be more about shrewd career moves, boss management, leadership styles, and corner offices. Nobody cared about their hair! And its colour.

My husband didn’t take this well. I tried to cheer him up, but the salon guys were losing their patience. (They clearly they were not aware that choosing hair colour is a life-changing decision.) I decided right there that I will write to thought leadership organisations and other such important places on why similar research is needed for men. That explains why Steve Jobs never got out of his blue jeans and black turtleneck. Who knows, he would have invented flying cars if he had just changed his wardrobe and streaked his hair blonde. 2017 was the year of the feminist power rising up; I say we got it all wrong!

It is the men who suffer; no one bloody cares how they look as long as the job is being done. That is absolutely not fair. It is high time we usher in true equality and the only way it can be done is to ensure that men like women are also evaluated based on their hair colour. What say?