The Pinterest fail files

By MARIAH YOUNG

Pinterest. It is just one of those things that catches your eye. The inspirational quotes, the fitness tips, the hair and makeup tutorials. It’s all so enticing, and the best part is that it all seems possible. The DIY coat rack, the three-minute mac-and-cheese cups and the outdoor adventures that always seemed like something you couldn’t do is now something accessible and Instagram-able. Is it really though? The answer is maybe, but not always.

A couple weeks ago, my little sister decided she wanted to darken her hair. She marched her naive freshman self across Jefferson Davis Highway to pick out hair dye at Giant. My sister, with naturally very dark brown hair decided to dye her hair all one color. Picking up what she thought was the color of her natural hair, midnight black, she walked out of the store, back to her dorm and promptly dyed her hair with her friends watching.

Approximately eight hours later I received an overwhelming number of calls, voicemails and texts. It caused a flashback to my first year at UMW, when I attempted to do the same thing. Now the Young sisters both know: never dye your hair freshman year. An hour of tears later, my sister and I stood in Target looking up ways to remove hair dye from hair. After several Google searches on our phone, we settled with a “pin” on Pinterest that seemed do-able at 10 p.m..

A solution, or so we thought: Dandruff shampoo, 50 crushed Vitamin C tablets, a shower cap and an hour of time should have removed the bold black hair that covered her face. After sitting under the shower cap with tingling roots, she came back with her hair…the exact same color we started at almost two hours ago.

While her hair was the same color, my hands, which served as the applicator, managed to turn bright orange and started burning with a weird copper smell. This lasted for almost two days, during which time I started my new internship in Washington, DC and shook hands with several new people.

Pinterest gives a stigma of everything being so easy, and always successful, but Pinterest is wrong and we intend to test some of the most famous, and also weirdest, pins.

In honor of this failed experiment, the Life section of The Blue & Gray Press plans to test out Pinterest experiments, recipes, DIYs and projects. Every other week we will come back with a review: did it work, was it easy or did it stain our entire wardrobe? It will allow you to wade through Pinterest, knowing what to skip over and what to actually pin for future projects.

If you are interested in testing out Pinterest projects on behalf of The Blue & Gray Press, or if you have an idea you want us to try, let us know!