This afternoon, I took a beauty-making trip to the salon to get my hair dyed with henna. For some inexplicable reason, I have had the urge to dye my hair in a bright-hot shade of red for months now. It started with an innocent trip to Superdrug in Edinburgh, on a whim meant to make my boyfriend cringe in disapproval. As we walked down the aisle of chemical-packed colours with names like “Egyptian Bronze” and “Honeysuckle Tan,” I gravitated to the electric-shock, neon-orange varieties of a colour called “ginger” in British-English (we Americans would just say “red”). But in the end, as usual, my pragmatic, holistic-thinking mind decided to save my scalp from ingredients like 4-ParaPhenyleneDiamine and C6H8N2. Generally, I try not to put things into my body whose names look like airline ticket confirmation codes.

So when I arrived in Bangladesh, it occurred to me that henna must be the answer! I had seen its affects on our wise old grandfather-like driver, Aziz: shots of bright color streaked through his dark brown hair. Surely, I reasoned, henna must be the magic bullet for overzealously coloured hair!

So I walked into the salon today, comforted by the unusual dominance of ladies: three surrounded the cash register, while their mothers and older sisters casually painted fingernails, trimmed toes, and plucked eyebrows with concentration and precision while idle copies of Cosmopolitan and Vogue lay discarded on the tables. I picked one up. The atmosphere of a women’s beauty salon, always familiar the world over, gave me a certain comfort in the rough world a Bangla-land. Not to mention, supporting a business in which women did all of the taking and making of money felt summarily pleasant.

After my hair was uncomfortably worked over with the thick henna paste, and set in a hovering, 1960s-style perma-blowdryer, I spent the next hour reading what I was soon to discover was both a boring and pretentious fashion magazine full of glossy, over-Photoshopped images of bizarrely alien-like creatures who I assume were supposed to resemble women. The tongue-in-cheek copy, celebrating various chic and expensive “green” and “ethical” efforts in New York and London, wasn’t much better.

Now, a few hours after sweating it out from my heated head down for an hour while I “read” the sparsely-placed articles in the magazine, I cannot remember one interesting thing I came across.

When the time came to wash the henna out, I was grateful. Finally, I sat before the mirror in a salon chair while the stylist prepared to dry my hair. She took off the towel so I could see my bright new exotic colour. Only, there was nothing exotic about it at all. In fact, the “red” was merely a little lighter than my original dark brown, with tones of highlight visible only under directly light. As the stylist began to dry my hair, I got so used to the colour I couldn’t see the difference between it and my original one. As she worked the brush in rolls around my hair, I realised it was drying practically miles from my head. And in fact now I feel a bit like the 1980s wife of a southern politician. My hair has never been this big in my life.

As I strive to make sense of this rather unfocused and irrelevant blog, I am struck by the enigma of my day: a western beauty salon; an eastern dye method; an unrealistic magazine; an unexpected outcome. When some things seem unquestionably out of reach, both in this society and around the world – gender equality, supermodel beauty, and naturally bright-orange hair, to name just a few – what makes us still, in the isolation of our own safe salons, still reach for them?