anything goes with emma chamberlain - my hair fell out [video]

Episode Date: February 26, 2023

[video available on Spotify] i have a horror story for you. an absolute horror story. it has to do with my hair. so let’s just get into it, let’s waste no time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello. I have a horror story for you. An absolute horror story. It has to do with my hair. So let's just get into it. Let's waste no time. Let's just get into the horror story. So in May of last year, I decided to dye my hair blonde. Now I've been blonde

before a few times in my life and it has always ended the same way where after a few months of being blonde my hair starts to break off because my hair can't handle the bleach anymore. Listen, no one's hair can handle bleach. Some people's hair can handle it better than other people's, but bleach is like poison for your hair. It just destroys your hair. Now listen, I know better than the next guy that blondes have more fun. I know that. And that's why I've been blonde multiple times in my life

because blondes have more fun. And I don't know. I've just always liked having platinum blonde hair. I've always liked it, but it's always a challenge. I can never keep blonde hair for longer than eight months because I just hit a point where all of my hair starts to break off. Anyway, so a few months ago, I decided I couldn't be blonde anymore. My hair was falling out.

It was so unhealthy. My hair was so brittle and dry and unhappy. And so I decided I was going to dye my hair back to my natural color. I was at my hair appointment and I was talking to my hairstylist and I was like, okay, so I need to go back to brown. My hair is falling out. Everything's going wrong. It's done. You know, this blonde era is done. It's over. Sorry. And she was like, well, before you go back to Brown, should we do something fun? And I said, you know, yeah.

Let's do something fun. Because once you go brown from blonde, you can't change your hair color again for a little while until all of your bleach grows out. You have to wait for all your bleach to grow out and then you can do something fun. Because if you try to put bleach over the brown hair that's over the bleached hair, your hair will fall out.

I don't know if that made sense, but you get the idea. So once you dye your hair brown after being blonde, you have to kind of stick to it, and you can't really go back to any lighter color after that. So my hairstyle is said, let's do something fun. I was like, let's do it. So we decide on this sort of orange color. And I was like, this is versatile enough,

where I can style it with clothes relatively easily. It's not like I have bright blue hair where it doesn't go with anything. Also, I wouldn't like bright blue hair that wouldn't look good on me. But also, it's unique enough and different enough where I'll have fun playing around with my look. You know, it'll give me something fresh and new and interesting to play with. Let's do it. So we do it. And I end up liking it. I wasn't obsessed with it, but I liked it enough.

It ended up being very challenging to style. I couldn't wear pretty much any warm color. Pink, red, orange, none of those colors looked good on me when I had orange hair. And that was a shame because I love wearing red. It's one of my favorite colors to wear. And I could not wear red when my hair was orange. It looked bad. I don't know why. It just looked awful. So anyways, so I'm kind of 50-50 on how I feel about this orange hair, but I couldn't really decide. So a on how I feel about this orange hair, but I couldn't really decide.

So a few weeks after I get the orange hair, I go back into the hair salon and I was there to get a touch up. While I was there, I was like, you know what, I think I might wanna go brown. I might need to dye my hair brown because I'm about to be traveling and I have some photoshoots I'm going to,

I have some fashion shows I'm gonna go to, and I don't know if the orange hair needs to have that strong of a moment. Like, do I really wanna have orange hair in a photo shoot? Do I really wanna have orange hair when I attend this fashion show? And the thing is, my orange hair was not a color that would be formed in nature.

The orange that I chose was unnatural. I didn't look like somebody who has naturally reddish hair. It looked a little bit sharper, which made it harder to style, as I mentioned earlier. And so I was like, do I really wanna do this? Do I really wanna stick to this and commit to this for the next few weeks when I won't have access to my hairdresser and there's gonna be photos taken

of me and stuff like that. After a long conversation with my hairstylist, I was like, you know what, I'm gonna keep the orange hair. I don't feel like it got enough appreciation from me yet. I don't feel like I've figured it out yet, how I like styling it, et cetera. So I'm gonna keep it for another month or so. So I'm gonna keep it for another month or so. A few days later, I leave to go to Paris

because I had to attend a fashion show and I had a few photo shoots in Paris. I get on the plane to go to Paris. And I'm like, I should have died my hair brown. I don't know why I kept the red hair. I regret it. I made the wrong decision. It's too risky. I don't know if it's going to look good with the outfit that I end up picking out for

the fashion show I'm going to. I don't know if it's going to look good for the photo shoots that I have to do. I regret my choice. I made a big mistake. So I start texting around trying to find a hairstylist in France who could do my hair the night that I arrive. Because I'm impulsive. This is an issue with me.

I love a last minute change. For example, I can't remember the last time I didn't change a flight last minute. I love changing a flight last minute. I like either changing a flight to leaving a day early or changing a flight to leaving a day early or changing a flight to leave five days later. I never keep my initial travel plans.

When I make travel plans, I always end up changing my entire itinerary. And I don't know why I do this. It's definitely toxic trait, definitely something I need to work out, whatever, it's fine. But apparently I have that same quality with my hair as well. So I decide I need to work out, whatever, it's fine. But apparently I have that same quality with my hair as well. So I decide I need to dye my hair brown. It becomes in obsession and a passion. I couldn't even look in the mirror at my red hair

or in chair, whatever color it was, without disgust. Something switched in my brain and I hated the color. On me anyway. So, luckily, I find a hairstylist who's available the night that I arrive. Great. I show up in Paris. I have some work to do. I get that done. I get to my hotel room at 8 p.m. The hairstylist meets me there. I've never met this guy.

I don't know him. I've never worked with him. I don't know anybody who's worked with him. But you know, he had good reviews. I was like, this is going to be fine. So first issue arises. We have a major language barrier. He speaks French in a little bit of English. I speak only English and no French at all.

Okay. Immediately, this starts to frighten me because because obviously it's neither of our faults. You know what I'm saying? Like actually if anything, it's my fault for not making sure that the person I hired to do my hair spoke English fluently. That was my bad. I should have made sure of that.

But I was like, listen, we have technology, we have Google Translate. We're gonna figure something out. So I managed to explain to him what the situation was. You know, my hair was bleached and then I dyed it orange and now I need to dye it brown. But my hair is very damaged, so we need to be careful with my hair

because it will fall out at any given moment. Okay, my hair is so fragile that, you know, you look at it wrong and it falls out. Okay, we need to treat my hair with the utmost love and care. And I want to dye my hair back to my natural light brown, medium brown color. Doesn't need to be anything fancy. I don't need highlights. I don't need

a bally-age. Like I just want brown fucking hair. Just brown hair. Back to the basics. We end up getting on the same page. You know, we had to use Google translate a little bit here and there, but overall we got on the same page. Brown hair. Now, going brown from pretty much any color isn't that hard. You know, it's just a matter of slapping the color on, letting it sit, washing it out, and then maybe toning it with some toner

to make the shade of brown right. But overall, it's not very complicated. Whereas bleaching your whole head and going platinum blonde is complicated. Bleach is a lot more of a finicky product. It can make your hair fall out, it can burn all your hair off, it can not work properly

and you don't end up getting that light platinum blonde color that you want. There's a lot more that can go wrong with bleach. So I wasn't too concerned about going brown with this stranger because going brown is much easier than going blonde. Right? And going brown is also a lot easier than dyeing your hair a bright color or something like that because, you know, there's a lot of mixing and fine-tuning that goes into dyeing your hair like a bright crazy color. So I was like, this is low risk. Or sorry, I thought. So luckily I set up a situation where this hairstyleist met me at my hotel, incredible, super easy.

He comes in, he sets up his stuff, I sit down in the chair. Next thing I know it, brown hair dye throughout my hair and we sit for like 20 minutes. Now I'm not freaking out at all. I'm like nothing could go wrong. This was so easy. This is too good to be true. You know, I can't believe I made this work.

You know, I made this big mistake, not dyeing my hair brown, but now everything's fine. My hair is gonna be brown in hour or less. Life is good. He washes the brown hair dye out of my hair. And I look in the mirror and my hair is black, like pitch black. Like if you were to get a pantone swatch of the blackest black, not even a tint of brown in it. That is what my hair was.

And I was like, wait, what? I hated it immediately. But my hair was wet, so I was like, maybe once we blow dry it, it will look lighter brown, maybe, but I'm starting to freak out because I'm like, wait a minute, if my hair is black, I can't get that color out because underneath this black hair dye, which is permanent, by the way, I have damaged bleach blonde hair that's about to fall out at any given moment. So I start freaking out because I'm like, if my hair is black, it's stuck like that.

I can't change it for 10 months, you know? Like I'm stuck with it. So I let him blow dry my hair and I look in the mirror. My hair is black. It looked like I was in eighth grader who went to CVS and bought black hair dye, I slapped it on my head myself and then went to school the next day in all of my clothes from Hot Topic and basically told everyone that this is the new me. That was the vibe I was giving off. I was not happy. Now, I have a really hard time standing up for myself when I pay for a service and I'm not satisfied with the service. For example, I go to a restaurant and they bring out the wrong meal for me.

Or they messed up what I ordered. I have a hard time sending it back. It makes me uncomfortable. Let's say I get my nails done and maybe they mess something up. Like the, I don't know, the polish is clumpy or something. I'll tell them it's the best manicure I've ever had in my life. I just don't feel comfortable telling people who are doing a service for me that I'm not satisfied with the service.

I feel terrible about it. I feel guilty about it. I avoid this type of confrontation at all costs. And the reason is because I feel bad. You know, I'm like, ah, they worked hard on this. Maybe. And I don't want to hurt their feelings or make them feel bad about themselves. I don't know. It's hard for me.

And I know that there's a polite way to do it that doesn't harm anyone, but it's still just a challenge for me. So I look in the mirror and I'm thinking to myself, am I going to tell this guy that he completely fucked up my color? Or am I just going to tell him that I love it and it's perfect? But I hated the hair so much and it was so wrong and not what I wanted that I told him I was like, listen up. I'm so sorry, but I think this color is too dark. Is there any way that we can lighten it at all without damaging my hair? Because obviously I've bleached hair under this.

And he's like, yeah, maybe. Again, big complication with communication because we had a language barrier. So I start trying to explain to him, you know, we can't use bleach or any product that has a similar effect as bleach because if we do, my hair is going to fall out. Also, if you're watching the video version of this and you keep seeing me look at the floor, it's because there's the biggest bug. I don't know what it is. It looks like a spider? Where even is it now? Now I'm scared. Because now it's gone. Where is it that spot on the floor?

It's so huge and it's kind of like floating around. It's like not walking. It's like floating in a weird way and I'm just scared that it's gonna float over to me into my pants, like crawl at my pants. Very frightened of it, so if you keep seeing me look at the floor, I'm just surveil and sing the area around me to make sure that it doesn't go at my pants. Because I have a phobia of that. I don't know why specifically in my pants. I guess because that's the most accessible

entrance point for said bug. Anyways, I felt confident that I explained thoroughly to him that my hair is so damaged and needs to be treated with utmost care. And I also explained to him that if I'm stuck with this color and there's no way to lighten it at all, you know, I'll be fine. So I'm pretty sure we're on the same page

and he says, okay, let's wash it again and see if more of the dye comes out. And then if it doesn't, then basically we'll put this product in it that will help basically strip off some of the color without ruining my hair. I was like, all right, so we washed my hair. We dry it all over again, same pitch black hair.

I was like, all right. So, you know, plant A didn't work. Time to go to plant B. So we go to plant B. And he puts this product in my hair. Now, I felt that I had communicated as well as I possibly could have. And I felt confident that he understood the state of my hair and that he wouldn't put anything in my hair that would further damage it or possibly make it fall out or anything like that.

So I'm kind of relaxed at this point. He puts this product in my hair and then he says, I need to go down to my car because I need to get something from my car, product for my car. So now it's just me and one of my agents in my hotel room sitting here waiting for this product to work its magic on my hair so I could have nice medium to light brown hair like I wanted. I pick up the bottle and I start looking at the bottle of the product that he put in my hair and the whole

bottle is in French. I can't understand a word on the bottle. So my agent and I start Google translating all the words on the bottle and we didn't see bleach on there, so that was good news. But one thing rang alarm bells in my head, hydrogen peroxide. I was like, hmm, that doesn't sound like it would be good for my hair. So we start googling hydrogen peroxide on hair in its effect. And then we start looking up hydrogen peroxide on bleached hair in its effect. The first article that comes up about hydrogen peroxide on bleached hair is that those two things don't go together. You put hydrogen peroxide on bleached hair is that those two things don't go together.

You put hydrogen peroxide on bleached hair and your hair will fall out. I reach behind my head and grab a piece of my hair to pull it in front of my face and see if it was still strong, or if it was starting to melt off. And I pull on it and it just starts clumping out. My hair is stretchy, it's snapping, it's disintegrating in front of my eyes.

And I was like, oh shit. I take off all my clothes. I turn on the shower in my hotel room bathroom. I hadn't used the shower in this hotel room yet. So I didn't know how to turn on the main shower. I only could figure out how to turn on the little handheld shower head, like the mini little handheld shower head. So I turned that on.

The shower is one of those little cubicle-looking showers with no bathtub attached. So I was able to lay on the ground with the shower door open and just hold the nozzle over my head while I scrubbed this product out of my hair. Meanwhile, I'm taking breaks to pull on my hair and just look at the clumps of my hair that are falling out. My agent is screaming at me. She's like, hey, stop ripping it out. And I was like, does it matter? It's coming out. It's done It's coming out Like I'm not gonna have any hair after this. So who gives a fuck if I'm ripping it out now. Who cares? I'm ripping it out

I'm not crying yet because I'm like in shock I just didn't expect this to happen. I kind of did, but I didn't. I get all of the hydrogen peroxide product out of my hair. I get in the shower and I shampoo and condition my hair three times, trying to get out all the residue I possibly could of this product. Meanwhile, I'm just looking at my hair, pulling and snapping and and breaking off and then I started to cry. Because in my heart, I knew that it's not that big of a deal. Okay, it doesn't matter.

It's just hair. It'll grow back. It doesn't impact or affect who I am as a person. I'm still I'm still the same person. You know, it has nothing to do with my identity. It has nothing to do with my Overall worth as a human being like it's just not that deep. It's just hair But it didn't matter because even though all of that is true, in that moment, I was heartbroken because I realized that I had taken my hair

for granted all this time. I treated my hair like shit, you know, bleaching it constantly, probably not using the right products on it all the time, dying it different colors all the time, not getting it trimmed enough. I hadn't treated it with proper loving care. And on top of that, as I just mentioned before, I took it for granted. I never even thought about how amazing it is to have hair. It just never crossed my mind.

You know, it had always been on my head, and I had just never thought of it. And that's a really fortunate perspective to have about hair, you know, to not think about it. You know, because there's some people who don't have hair. There's some people who can't grow hair. There are some people who have really thin hair, you know, that is hard to manage, et cetera. And I realized all in this moment that I had taken my hair for granted,

not appreciated it enough, not taken care of it enough. And, you know, I might lose it and I might not have hair for a little while. And it was emotional for me. And to be honest, on a surface level, in a way, I was scared of what I would look like. And I know that that sounds so ridiculous. No, it doesn't actually. It doesn't, because as much as I know in my,

in my core, in my heart, that my external appearance has nothing to do with my worth or my value or my confidence, et cetera. I would be lying if I said that my appearance didn't have a significant impact on how I view myself. That's something I'm battling on a constant basis, you know, trying to sort of shift my value into what's really important, which is what type of person I am, rather than putting value in what I look like. But I'm a human being, and I'm still on that journey. And as much as I hate to admit it, I still do put value into my appearance. That still does hold value to me. And so in a vain way, I was mortified thinking about what I might look like, depending on how my hair

ends up looking at the end of this mess. you know? It was kind of an internal battle for me. Half of me was like, I know this shit doesn't matter. And I should just be grateful that I have hair at all. But then the other side of my brain was like, yeah, but also like, are you gonna look like shit? And what's everyone gonna say on the internet? You know what, Lord knows, you know what I mean? It's like, am I gonna get made fun of

or people gonna say that I'm ugly? Can I handle that? Can I handle? If people call me ugly, can I handle? If people have negative things to say because I'm sensitive, still, you know, again, I like to say mean comments about me, don't bother me, et cetera, et cetera.

But then they do every once in a while. And I'd be lying if I said that that didn't happen. I don't know if I'll ever fully be resilient to mean comments and mean things that people say. Long story short, I get out of the shower, I'm drawing off, I'm crying naturally. I brush my hair out and there's still some left, you know, there's hair left. There's chunks in pieces that are thin or missing or weird, but I had hair left. And so I was like, you know what, all right. We're gonna figure this out. Although I was still concerned

because I was like, what if it all falls out when I'm sleeping tonight? You know when my head's rubbing up against my pillow, what if all my hair falls out and I'm sleeping in the back of my head, and then I have a big bald spot in the back of my head? I'm still paranoid, but at least I had a little bit left. The hair stylist gets back from his car where he was getting some products out of his car and we explained to him what happened and he's

just confused. Like he, which by the way is not his fault, you know, again, the language issue that we were having was neither of our faults. It was an unfortunate part of this experience, but there's nothing we could have done about it, right? It is what it is. He put some products in my hair that were supposed to sort of heal the broken hair. He didn't really understand why my hair was falling out, but he did feel bad, and I'm cool with him, okay? It wasn't his fault. Well, maybe it kind of was, but

it wasn't, because we weren't able to communicate properly, but he put some nourishing products into my hair that would help it regain its strength and he went on his way. My hair dries and I'm kind of looking around at it and it is just a mess, you know. Again, it's just choppy all over my head. And so I was like, all right, I'm going to need to figure out a way to make this livable. You know, I can't walk around like this. I either need to shave it all off or figure out a haircut that will make it look normal and not like I put my head in a blender.

So the next day, I'm thinking and I'm like, all right, well, I could either do extensions or I could figure out some sort of like shaggy haircut that could cover all this up. Extensions are too high maintenance for me. I don't know how people do it, okay? It takes like five hours to get them in

and you have to get them redone constantly. And it's like $5,000 every time you want to get it done. You have to get it done like, I don't know, once every two months or something. That is not my lifestyle, so I book a haircut. The hairstylist comes in and I explain, listen, we need to make this hair look normal. And he says, all right, we're gonna do a shag.

Okay, we're gonna figure out some sort of shaggy, bob length, but maybe a little shorter sort of haircut that we can do that will hide this. And at least, you'll be able to style it and it'll look intentional. Like it'll look like you meant to do it. And I was like, great. So we cut this sort of shaggy haircut. I don't love it. You know, I went into the hair appointment the night before, excited to come out with a light brown, medium brown bob. And the next day I have, you know, a dark, black, shaggy, borderline punk rock emo hairstyle that I wasn't expecting to have.

But you know what? I convinced myself that I liked it. And I looked at it as a challenge. Like how am I going to style this hair? You know, how am I going to use it as a way to express myself? What clothes am I going to wear to match with the hairstyle? How am I going to do my makeup to compliment the hairstyle, etc. And I looked at it as more of a challenge. Normally, I feel like my visual identity is in my control.

You know, I always get to choose what color I dye my hair, what haircut I have, the way I do my makeup, the way I pick out my outfits, et cetera. But in this situation with my hair, it was kind of out of my control in a way. You know, accidents happen that made it completely different than what I had chosen. And so it was sort of an inspiring challenge to take hair that I wasn't obsessed with

and try to make it a positive thing. Now listen, have I gotten some shit on the internet for my hair? Yes. Are people saying it looked like Finn Wolfhardt? Yes. Are people saying that I look like a little boy? Yeah. Are people saying that I look like shit in ugly and I'm in my glow-down era?

Sure. That's okay. That's okay. Because I'm just grateful I have hair on my fucking head. All right. And I'm grateful that I'm just alive on the planet. All right, my family is okay, my friends are okay. Life is good. Having a thin, wolf-hard haircut is not going to be the thing that kills me. It's not that big of a deal. I think I did learn

a valuable lesson, which was number one, you know, your body is your temple. You get one body, you get one life as far as we know. We have to treat ourselves with respect and love and care and I don't think that I was doing that enough. You know, I wasn't taking care of my hair. I don't always take care of my skin or my nails or my mind. You know, I'm not always prioritizing taking care of my body, my physical self. And I think it just reminded me that that does need to be a priority for me because you do only get one physical body. And you want to treat it right so that you don't end up in a situation where half of your head of hair is in the shower drain in a hotel in Paris.

Listen, it couldn't happen in a worse place. At least all my hair fell out in Paris. I love Paris. I love being there. It's one of my favorite places in the world. Like, at least that's better. Like, if it had to fall out, I guess, you know, it happening in Paris isn't the end of the world.

But I also learned that I have more work to do when it comes to disconnecting my visual identity to myself worth. Because even though I knew that my physical appearance, not being ideal, has nothing to do My worth as a person, my value as a person, et cetera. I did find myself feeling worse about myself because I didn't feel as confident in the way that I looked and I felt Kind of Judgmental towards myself about how I looked at first when my hair was Not the way I planned it to be so that just proved to me that even though I I have my head in the right place about the whole thing

You know my worth is solely determined by what type of person I am, not by the way that I look, I found myself not abiding by my own philosophy on what gives someone worth. You know, even though I'm shouting from the rooftops that what you look like has nothing to do with your value as a person, when my visual identity was in jeopardy, I guess, in my eyes, because my hair was destroyed, I felt myself hating myself a little bit and feeling less valuable in a weird way. I immediately lost half of my confidence and that shouldn't be the case. In an ideal world, all my hair falls out and I have 50 pimples and all my teeth fall out and my nose is broken in sideways and my ears chopped off and my eyeball is dangling out of my head and I look in the mirror and I'm like, but you're a good person.

So, who cares that you look like this? Like in an ideal world, nothing that happens on the outside of my body in my physical realm could impact the way that I view myself. In an ideal world, the way that I view myself is concrete and locked and loaded, you know, and nothing can shake it. But when my hair was in jeopardy, I learned that I'm not there yet and I still have work to do with that, because it affected

my confidence a little bit too much. So listen, the moral of the story is, I look like fin wolf hard now. People have always been saying I look like Timothy Shalame more than usual. Listen, things could be worse. A lot of people have crushes on Finn Wolfhardt and Timothy Shalamey. I could have worse doppelgangers. I could have a worse haircut. It'll grow out one day.

The black hair dye is slowly fading into a darker brown rather than a black, which looks better with my features. I have brown eyebrows, so it looked a little weird when my hair was black and my eyebrows were brown, it looked a little off, and life goes on. Don't beat yourself up if you find yourself putting too much value into your physical appearance. It's human, you know? But I think it should be a goal for all of us to shift as much of that value as we can into

who we are as a person on the inside, instead. It's an ongoing journey that we're probably going to be on our whole lives, keeping that in check, but it's a good journey to be on and it's an important journey to be on. The first step is to be aware of it and to be aware of the fact that you do it too. You know what I mean? You put too much value in your physical appearance. That's all I got for today, you guys. do it too. You know what I mean? You put too much value in your physical appearance. That's all I got for today, you guys. Thank you all for listening and hanging out. It was a pleasure. It was my pleasure.

I love and appreciate all of you so much. If you want to check out my coffee company, you can chamberlaincoffee.com. And you can use code AG 15 for a little discount if you want. Follow anything goes on Instagram at anything goes and on Twitter at AG podcast. That's like that. I'll talk to you later. See ya. And love ya.