“OK, look at that girl over there,” Kennedy directed. She pulled her Diors down her nose a bit so I could see her eyes gesturing over to a girl in a tankini lying out across the pool. “Total brownout.”

I took a peek over at the napping tankini-ed stranger.

“Brownout” is a term we coined for a girl who was totally hot because she was blond, but if you put brown hair on her, she’d just be normal to fugly. And the truth is that you can’t tell someone’s brownout status from far away. You need to get a good look at her face. But Kennedy had just recently decided to go dark and was trying to convince herself that she and Cameron Diaz were the only two women on planet

Earth who look hotter as brunettes. So I nodded, agreeing to the brownout situation across the pool, not sure if by bashing every woman who dared to look good blond in Manhattan I was enabling the rapid growth of a cancerous mega-ego or just easing a friend through a bad hair period.

“Yeah, highlights are definitely God’s gift to some women,” she said with disdain. As if three weeks ago she hadn’t been one of those plebes who enjoyed the exponential hottening factor of professionally applied peroxide.

I sighed, running my hand through my head of what I was trying to sun-bleach into auburn waves, but was really just plain brown and in a sweaty tangle. My mom thought fifteen was too young for highlights and had denied me the parental credit card for a salon trip more times than Nicole Richie has denied anorexia allegations. And after one attempted at-home highlights session left me looking streakier than the love child of Kelly Clarkson and bargain-bran...