The smell of Feria hair dye in the afternoon

and other fun 90s afterschool activities

I think I was 16, the first time I ventured outside of my normal sun-in hair lightening routine.

Whoa, what’s up with this 90s advertising. Brilliant reverse psychology??

Once I tried my first box of semi-permanent hair dye (basically a gateway drug) there wasn’t a hair dye brand I didn’t experiment with (much to my mother’s horror/disgust).

Feria was the Lamborghini of hair dyes. It had a crazy lightener in it (straight bleach) and got me pretty close to Platinum until my very generous/concerned aunt treated me to a head full of foils at a salon..

“Are you dying your hair? It smells HORRIBLE. Like a chemical spill throughout the entire house” -that’s my mom (a little background here, my mom’s sense of smell is akin to a heat seeking missle and or blood hound. She was once able to smell a cigarette that I hadn’t even lit yet from the basement. Of course the sliding door was open to negate/filter the cigarette smoke away from the house, but just as the baby bic flame latched onto my Newport 100 (so beautiful) my mom screamed down

It really was a pleasure.

“APRIL MICHELLE ARE YOU SMOKING IN THE HOUSE?!” She could smell the barely lit cigarette 3 floors up. NASA should study her. Hi mom, love ya, mean it )

So, while she was screaming up to me I was blowdrying my freshly dyed locks and admiring my handiwork so my usual response was:

“OMG MOM! Just chill! No one’s dying their hair” (Wow, was I an OG gaslighter?)

Then I’d proceed to feveriously gather up the boxes of hair dye (I always had to buy two, my hair is insanely thick and resembled cousin IT’s through much of high school).

I would then sneakily dispose of the evidence in the backyard (aka, basically hiding the dye boxes and materials under a mound of leaves bordering the neighbors lawn) I mean genuis right? Who was ever going to find that random CVS bag.

Oh, just my parents when their raking the leaves every weekend like clockwork.

“April, what the hell is this?”

Clearly, I was/am very smart. Don’t let that below average High School GPA fool ya.

Other fun 90s afterschool activities:

The pool-of course.

TRL, that’s Total Request Live for you nerds that were busy doing after school sports.

But if you were like me (un-cool, cool I like to call it) most of the time all the really creative, rad stuff (like starting a band, prank calling people you loved/hated, and re-creating Delia’s style photo shoots on a random Tuesday.) All happened in your best friends bedroom, kinda just like this one.

What were your favorite 90s after-school memories?

XO

April