creative CONVOS + 🪮🌈🧴 how to dye your hair 🧴🌈🪮

Announcing an ~exciting~ new chat show on creativity and a deep dive on dyeing your hair.

This month’s How To Be Creative™ entry is based on your vote for which subjects to explain and explore. Vote for the next subject at the bottom. Revisit older entries in the series, like How To Be A Creative, How To Run A Newsletter, How To Write About Art, How To Write For Social Media, How To Pitch, How To Decorate, How To Give A Gift, How To Go To Grad School, How To Host a Dinner Party, and How To Write An Essay.

Before we get into the latest entry in dyeing your hair, I have a very special announcement about this series on creativity: we’re entering our talk show era 🤭

This series has been one of the more surprising gifts in The Trend Report™ universe in that these posts get a lot of attention, which is fab as they are designed to uplift and elevate readers and the wider “community,” a la: creatives of all ages who are trying to navigate an increasingly strange and anti-creative world. These posts are a lot of work but I do it because I wish someone out there had mentored me in these ways on my path toward being a working writer and working creative. I hope you all are able to learn and grow and do something with these posts!

Anyway, the news, which extends that ethos: I’m very pleased to share the launch of the How To Be Creative™: Conversations series, a season of live chats with people who I really love and really respect who you’ve likely seen around this newsletter and who are going to offer their expertise to help you level up in a given area of creativity. This first “season” of Conversations is focused on specific genres of writing and will come to life as a monthly hour-long live chat where you can join in for the thirty to forty minute convo between myself and my guest, followed by a twenty minute Q&A session. These conversations are free, with replay videos being open to paid subscribers in my and my guest’s newsletter(s). The goal is to offer expertise while supporting working creatives: it takes a village! Let’s support each other!!!

Now…let’s meet our creative experts and the subjects they’ll be covering!!

• On September 24, Max Berlinger will be lending his expertise on fashion writing and identifying trends, both as a fan of fashion and as someone who writes about fashion trends for a living. Max and I originally chatted a year ago about the state of the industry and have become good friends over the time, sharing thoughts on the industry and general thoughts on the world. Max is someone whose expertise and insights on fashion I find to be critical and his Add 2 Cart newsletter is a wellspring of such thinking. For the unfamiliar, Max is known for his regular contribution on fashion and style for GQ, The New York Times, Bloomberg, and more: if you’ve been wanting to write about fashion and trends along with pitching stories to publications on the subject, this one’s for you.

  • 🚨SAVE THE DATE AND RSVP AT THIS LINK 🚨: This conversation is happening September 24 at 12P EST / 9A PST / 6PM CEST. See you there!

• In October, Philip Sherburne will join to talk about music writing and criticism as one of the leading voices (To me!!!) in this area. I’ve followed Philip’s writing for literal decades, starting in the mid-aughts as a teenager reading Pitchfork, Resident Advisor, Wire, Mixmag, and more venues to find more music and learn more about the contemporary electronic scene from my small town in Georgia. Philip is an expert in the world of experimental, dance, and generally forward-thinking music, known for both his ongoing reviews for Pitchfork and thoughtful analysis on subjects like the state of dance music and profiles on figures from Panda Bear to Rosalía. His Futurism Restated newsletter is a go-to for the most interesting music of the moment, along with the label he co-runs, Balmat. And, if our chat on these subjects a year ago is indication of anything, it’s that there’s a lot going on in the world of music writing and criticism, particularly given the weight of business and fandom on the form. If you’re a writer or musician who wants to write about this world, a music fan hoping to think more critically about music, or someone who hopes to talk about music in better ways, this is for you.

• In November, Rax Will will pop in to explore queer narratives, translating identity into writing. Rax is a dear friend who I met in grad school in LA, as we were both Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Fellows in 2018. He and I really bonded over writing about and sharing our identities, as expressed by our various published efforts over the years. Rax and I co-wrote stories on queerness, I commissioned Rax to write about his identity when I was helping edit Pride essays for Popsugar, he has consulted on many a pitch of mine, and we’ve shared work with each other over the years, seeking feedback for everything from my mega deep dive on queer food to his fiction writing about being a gold star queer. He’s my queer writing ride-or-die and someone who I could talk to endlessly about autofiction. He’s written for Them, Into, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Eater, and so many more spots along with running the newsletter Rax’s World. If you’re queer (Or of any identity, really!) and are hoping to translate your experiences into traditional and non-traditional writing, this one’s for you.

• In December, Sarah Labrie will take us on a deep dive into memoir, essay, and beyond. Sarah is most recently the author of the memoir No One Gets to Fall Apart, which was one of the The New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2024, an NPR 2024 Books We Love pick, and was one of Esquire’s “best memoirs” of the last year. Like Rax, I first met Sarah in 2018 through the LARB Publishing Fellowship, where she was one of faculty for the program. Sarah and I have kept in touch over the years and she is someone whose output constantly impresses me as she is always translating her life and experience in some fashion: not only does Sarah write memoir and essay but also fiction stories, scripts, and libretto. An inspiration! Sarah has contributed writing to many places over the years — not only her newsletter but The Guardian, Electric Literature, and the Los Angeles Review of Books — and I see our conversation as a continuation of the chat on memoir we had last year. If you are an aspiring essayist or someone who has been dreaming of writing a memoir, this one’s for you.

I am so excited about these! And can’t wait to see you for these chats!! Again: the first conversation is September 24 at 12P EST / 9A PST / 6P CEST with Max Berlinger. Add the link in the sentence before to your calendar to RSVP and, if you are in a time zone that is outside of the chat time, DM me as I will personally send you a link to view. Now…onward to hair dyeing!!

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For the better part of a decade, I’ve dyed hair. Sure, I’ve experimented with coloring my hair since I was a teen — but I didn’t commit to dyed hair being a part of my identity until the late 2010s.

It happened some time around grad school, when I had been going to a stylist who did pink and rainbow and red, all sorts of experiments that I was down to play around with. At a certain point, the salon he worked at closed and I was shifting from working full time to being a student — and I was not going to be spending hundreds of dollars for someone to put color in my hair.

Thus started a journey of dyeing my own hair, which I’ve now become a bit of an expert at. I have a set system and set pattern, even developing my own “signature” color that I’ve now worn since 2018, changing periodically to try something different (and use up leftover dyes from years past).

Surprisingly, questions about dyeing one’s hair come up a lot when your hair is dyed and, for whatever reason, it’s something you all were looking for help with — and I am more than happy to share that. To me, dyeing hair is one of the most important real estates of expression, a part of the body where you can further extend your identity, be it to assert your gender, share your personality, or generally situate yourself with the larger culture. Dyeing your hair in 2025 isn’t as radical as getting a tattoo but is bolder than wearing a crop top: it’s semi-permanent, changeable over time or with the next haircut. It is both an expression of trends and in defiance of them. Thus, my love for dyeing.

But how do you do it? What are some tips for approaching such a subject? We’re going to tackle this in a few parts: explaining general best practices, a step-by-step break down of the bleach process, followed by the coloring process, ending with upkeep advice. Note that this advice varies though as things are very dependent on your hair: I have semi-thick Puerto Rican hair that is originally fairly brown with a tendency toward lightness (as I was a hashtag born blonde kid).

🧴 A few best practices

• If you have really cold feet, invest in your first dye job — meaning: work with a professional. It will not be cheap but this will give you an idea of how your hair reacts to bleach, which is the trickiest part. They can also give you a solid coloring without your having to invest in all the products and the process of hair dye tools, in case you don’t like how things turn out.

• If you’re going to spend money on anything, pay someone to bleach your hair — not color it. The bleaching process is the most “tricky” as there are many variables (Your hair texture! How you mix the components together! If you put too much or too little in! If your hair is too clean or too dirty!), which is all ameliorated by a professional. Don’t have them color, as that takes more time and costs more money. It’s not worth it.

• A less costly option? Get bottle bleach and bottle color from the supermarket and experiment. I don’t use supermarket products because they are weaker, older, and generally not-good — but they are good for entry level hair dyeing. I would recommend L’Oreal Creme Excellence as that was what I always used during my baby process as a teen and young adult. If you want to do a step up, the Manic Panic bleach kit is excellent.

• If you’re doing the whole process yourself, book out at least two hours: the bleaching should take thirty minutes to an hour while I “bake” the color for at least an hour. I also prefer to do this at home because I can be at my computer, can clean my apartment, and or generally do things on my to do list versus being stuck at a hair salon. I wish I had those seven hours and seven hundred dollars to burn! But I do not. I make very little at this point in my life and I only get my haircut four times a year as a result ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• This is obvious but must be said: never do any of this process while wearing anything “nice” as you will ruin those clothes. Wear pajamas or house work clothes, things that you don’t care about bleaching and or that you wouldn’t get mad if a glob of color falls on it.

• To that: don’t bleach your hair alone, which is less about safety and more for someone to help fill in blanks. I do it by myself all the time but I find that — despite my belief that I do everything the best because I do it by myself — when Bobby Aaron Solomon bleaches my hair, it turns out better, as he can better “paint” the bleach on.

• If your hair is short and very close to the skin (akin to a buzz), don’t bleach it. You’re wasting your time as that’s not enough hair to color. You’ll just end up burning your skin.

• If you’re going to dye, the color you choose is important as some fade faster than others. This is largely dependent on things like the original color of your hair, how good or bad the bleach job is, how much you sweat, and how often you wash or wet your hair. Go for a full color versus a pastel or “light” color because colors that aren’t sturdy fade fast. Think a hot pink over a light pink, a neon turquoise versus baby blue: the former almost always fades to the latter while the latter always fades to an ashy bleach job. I go bold then let it decay. You’re dyeing your hair: go bold. If you want to be a bit more tame, don’t dye your hair or just bleach it. Don’t waste your time on the extremely temporary, in my opinion!

🤍 The bleach breakdown

The tools that you will need are the following —