Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Let’s do this together
It must be nice to be so unaware that you consider being denied the opportunity to bleach your hair and order red fishnets from Amazon a literal hate crime that invalidates your existence – even during a global catastrophe.
Welcome to my world! A place where The Dark Lord is determined to use this latest lockdown to be temporarily reborn as Harley Quinn, her deeply unstable teen girl crush from the movie Suicide Squad.
She’s been nagging me relentlessly since the start of homeschooling. “Look, Mum, they can’t see me in class as the cameras are turned off, so that’s plenty of time to bleach my hair, dye it pink and blue, and then turn it brown again when… or if… we go back to school,” she says, trying to sound entirely reasonable.
This is all part of her “style” change, which as far as I can see in the online Amazon basket – where she’s left them in the hope I’d be stupid enough to order by accident – is just a bunch of fake punk accessories, fishnets and mini kilts.
When I asked her why her new style in the basket also included a pair of bondage-style garters, she looked at me like I was mad. “What are you talking about?” she looked confused. “They’re part of my anime cosplay dress-up for Minecraft gaming.”
“Looks dodgy to me,” I grumbled, possibly sounding like Nora Batty.
“I think that says more about your mind, Mum,” she raised her eyebrows pointedly.
Apart from anything else, this new style she wants is impossible as Jesse has the sort of thick, dark curly hair that blocks drains, and as she also hasn’t had a haircut since sometime last summer, it would be like giving a Highland cow a makeover.
We’ve been this way before with The Great Ear Piercing Row when I was forced to wait outside the shop last autumn because of Covid restrictions while she chose the world’s smallest stud earrings to pierce her ears. A month later, they had to be extracted from inside her earlobes and the holes left to close up again.
Now she thinks that having watched a few makeovers on Tik Tok – where girls instantly change themselves from mousy brown to edgy bob with platinum streaks in three easy steps, conveniently missing out the bit where the hair goes bright orange or burns to a frazzle – she can create the same effect.
But as the late Carrie Fisher joked, “Instant gratification takes too long,” and this is especially true when you’re a teenager.
So I’m probably wasting my time fighting it, and also I probably don’t have much of a leg to stand on because she’s seen old Polaroids of the bad bleach job I did on my spiky hair in the 1980s.
In my defence, at least I used a proper bottle of toxic bleach, and I still have the scars to prove it.
Also, a small part of me thinks, “If you have to order your new punky persona from Amazon to rebel, kid, then frankly, you’re not trying nearly hard enough.”