The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Beauty brains Going back to my roots
Why Lisa Armstrong is finally embracing her natural ‘mousy’ brown
When I was a teenager watching my hair turn from wheat blonde to light brown seemingly in front of my eyes, my mother tried to console me by saying, ‘The great thing about mouse is that you’ll be able to dye it any colour you want.’
Mouse gets an incredibly bad rap, which is why I’ve been everything from red to blonde to auburn, plus an unfortunate flirtation with green. Until recently, I was a dark blonde because I thought that would mean my greys would show less. Turns out, once you hit the tipping point, the greys show whatever. It meant learning to live with them, or do some DIY colour.
I decided on the
DIY approach. That meant simplifying things. No trying to emulate the balayage of my brilliant colourist Sally Northwood. A simple ammonia-free home dye that covers the greys without making me look witchy was what I wanted. I found it in a semi-permanent from Clairol. It turned me mouse, although of course they didn’t call it that.
Although it didn’t completely cover the greys, I consider it a stonking success. It’s even, natural-looking and – bonus! – my hair’s more or less the same colour as the fabulous Andréa in Call My Agent, who may be a mouse, but is anything but mousy.
Mouse may not be the shade that dazzles, especially when it’s next to a pumped-up Titian or a peroxide blonde, but in addition to requiring more time in a salon than I have patience for, drastic colour jobs, particularly ones that contain peroxide, are like taking a wrecking ball to the condition of your hair, particularly if it’s fine and dry in the first place. If it’s a choice between being blonder or having hair that doesn’t break off once it gets halfway to my shoulders, I’ll take the latter.
So I’m embracing my mouse and focusing on qualities that are as important as colour but often overlooked – condition, texture and shine. A weekly date with Philip Kingsley’s Elasticizer is a given. Washing my hair every four days instead of every other day is another (George Northwood’s new range of shampoos and conditioners are game changers. I use Unpolluted and I can now manage a DIY silky-smooth blow-dry every time).
I’m popping fish-oil capsules and mainlining collagen – the new big thing in the beauty industry – in the form of almost tasteless powder creamers that I combine with oat milk in my frother and add to my morning coffee. And every so often, I apply Virtue’s brilliant Color Revival Kit to pep things up. Cutting back on the chemical dyes has left my hair shiny, soft and stronger. That’s a useful lesson to take into the future. Mouse, it turns out, is a slow burn.