As someone not afraid to look critically into the mirror, I often find my hair lacking. While it can indeed be shiny, soft, and smooth, it can also be dull, coarse, and tangled. Its quality, like that of my singing voice and that of my housecleaning efforts, seems random, certainly not controllable by me. I know what competence feels like, and in the realm of haircare, I am forever a novice.

Nonetheless, during the past two or three years I frequently find myself the recipient of admiring comments about my hair, which is new to me. It’s unclear whether hair or technology is being admired, as my hair has not been naturally pigmented for years. I switched to a more-natural, if coloring one’s hair is in any sense natural, product since I moved to California, so let’s give credit where it’s due: Naturtint 5C.

The compliments have stepped up now that I find myself discussing hair products with customers at work, though these are often tacit. For instance, one customer asked me for shampoo advice and my only idea was to indicate the shampoo I currently used, with which he promptly absconded. I use that technique a lot now. If customers linger, I mention that everyone in my family has thick wavy hair, though no one has been deterred by this yet.

An elderly man in a wheelchair and his adult daughter came in recently to purchase hair color for their wife/mother. Both were Chinese speakers; he seemed to have no English so she was “translating,” from presumably fluent Chinese to a handful of presumably English nouns with an occasional verb. They wanted a color called sateen, by which I thought they may have may have meant satin.

Hair color adjectives are marketing terms, and provide no clue as to the tint or tone, and we don’t carry any that use the word satin in any case. What I really needed to know is the number/letter combo that is shared across brands, but I emphatically failed at attempting to explain that. They resorted to examining the pictures on the boxes, at the end of which they chose, from three shelves of product, the exact hair brand and color I currently use. What luck! I emphatically succeeded at indicating, mostly gesturally, that this hair on my head was that tint. They examined my hair closely, discussed it at length, and left with that box.