Neapolitan Hair

I have to get this out of the way: I first typed Neapolitan with an ‘o’ as the third letter. I was puzzled that the e-spelling warden underlined it. C’mon, warden. Surely you know this word, I frowned. That’s usually why the warden underlines my words, because she doesn’t know some of the weirder words I use. But this time the warden was right.

Makes sense that Neapolitan would have an ‘a’ in the first syllable, since it’s the adjective form of Naples, an important city in south Florida. I’m not sure why the ‘e’ was inserted before the ‘a’ way back when. In fact, a better word would be Napeltan. Rhymes with Jean Stapleton. Or Naplestan, which doesn't.

Apologies for starting this story with a too-long bit about the spelling of the first word in the title. Getting spelling wrong is a dagger to my heart. I was the 1969 fourth grade Papermate Spelling Champion of Western Salisbury Elementary School.

Many of you already know that, because it’s the first thing I tell people.

I have a pen to prove it. The whole year I spelled only one word wrong, vegetable. Yes, I left out the second ‘e.’ Well, in my defense it’s silent, more or less. And that’s a poor excuse for misspelling any word in the English language. You’re lucky if they sound anything like they’re spelled. The first time my son typed asthma he spelled it azma. OK, he was three, sitting on my lap.

When spell-check came along, my market value dropped dramatically.

If you’re of a certain age, you may associate NeApolitan with a carton of ice cream containing chocolate, vanilla and pink flavors. Mid-century ice cream came in rectangular boxes. In our house the pink was always the last to go. By then the pink would be full of ice crystals. The garbage disposal or the dog got it when none of the rest of us would touch it.

I love a good strawberry ice cream when it’s made with actual strawberries. Of the supermarket brands I recommend Haagen-Daz.

The memory of that mid-century carton of chocolate-vanilla-pink turned out to be the solution to a problem that had been plaguing me for over a decade.

I had blond hair throughout my childhood, but as I moved into adulthood, it darkened up to a color called Mouse. When I was in my mid-thirties I decided to re-blondify it, and purchased a box of Sun-In from the drugstore. Other old people might remember that product. It had an earworm of a jingle, based on “Sunny,” a song Marvin Gaye made popular in the 1960s.

Sun-In was a gateway drug to actual salon visits, every four weeks. By the time I started graying, I had no idea I was graying. I didn’t really want to know what was under that expensively maintained golden hue.

In my mid-forties I started worrying about the transition from golden hue to whatever was underneath. I wanted to be prepared, because I knew that at some point in my life, I wanted to make the transition. I like to plan important things in advance.

I talked a good friend who was ten years younger and had changed from artificial blond to beautiful, long white hair. She has a PhD in chemistry and started thinking about the dye contacting her scalp, which is dangerously close to her brain. She and I agree that our brains are our favorite organs.

What she did was to stay inside for two years.

I knew an Indian guy at work who had luxurious black hair. One day he showed up with his head shaved. It grew in white.

My friend Bee is five years older. Her strawberry-blond hair color, it turned out, had never faded. She was no help.

I visited the oracle of YouTube for ideas. There were many, none of which seemed quite right for me. It occurred to me that I might be looking for a solution that didn’t exist.

I talked to my new boss about my tentative plan to go gray. She is fifteen years younger, much fancier than I, with expensive clothing, curated jewelry, and perfect hair that had been transformed from dark brown to blondish, including optimized streaks of at least three colors. I never could figure out a way to connect with her, and we’d had only one personal conversation before that, about Apple watches. I was about to buy one and was trying to decide whether to get the 40mm or the 44mm case. She suggested the 44mm case, because it makes your upper arm look slimmer. She had the Hermes version. Of course she did.

By the way, I wear my 44mm iWatch with the nylon sport band on my lower arm. My upper arm remains unaffected. Even if it had looked slimmer, what about the other one?

She didn’t really want to answer this question, but she finally said, Well, gray hair will make you look older. A week later, she laid me off. Maybe she hadn't suspected I was old, because of my golden hair, and I’d accidentally let something very meaningful slip.

Time for something wild. It was five days before my sixtieth birthday. I had no job, and the pandemic was raging. I don’t drink alcohol or do other recreational drugs, but something fun and bold was called for.

And it hit me: Neapolitan hair.

Back in the mid-nineties I rented a townhouse, three blocks from work, that I loved. It was rustic-looking (for a townhouse complex in an industrial area), with a lovely patio and a huge California pepper tree that provided shade, beauty, and more peppercorns than everyone in town could use over their cumulative lifetimes. A great friend lived next door. The only argument with the townhouse was that the walls of the downstairs bathroom were papered with in-your-face floral. I went fun and bold and hung posters of flowers.

Aha!

I dyed the bottom third of my hair pink. The top third was silver and the middle third, gold. The pink looked as fake as the pink ice cream, and probably tasted about the same. I don’t know. The dog ate it.

[Neapolitan hair, subtle but apparent. Beau took this photo for my LinkedIn page, in 2020. That's why it looks so formal. There were times when the pink part was a bright magenta, but this fade represents the best balance of the three flavors.]