Let's talk about my hair for a minute. This is just a story, a mystery, really - no product review or beauty lesson learned.

Lately I've been thinking of giving my hair a name, something like Hamburglar or Audrey II, the plant from Little Shop of Horrors.

Why? Well, my hair...it eats things. It's hungry, hungry hair. At this point I totally think my hair could win the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest.

But I suspect hot dogs aren't really its style. It prefers to eat things like shampoo, dye, and hairspray. And its appetite will not be curbed!

You should see how quickly I go through a bottle of shampoo. A quarter-sized dollop doesn't even produce any lather in my hair...it just seems to sink in and disappear. Two quarter-sized dollops? Still nothing. A palmful? Now we're getting somewhere.

I used to attribute this to crappy shampoo formulas, but then when I started getting my hair highlighted, my stylist and I discovered that my hair also likes to eat dye. About 3 weeks after getting (permanent) highlights, they'd be gone. I never saw them wash down the drain or come off on my clothes, they just seemed to disappear into the night, leaving my hair exactly as it was before.

After quite a bit of money and time eaten up by my hungry little head, we switched to bleach, which finally worked, and remains the preferred solution to this day. My hair's inability to hold color was chalked up to its redhead roots (well, it may have been strawberry blonde as a child, and chestnut as a teen, but now it's just brown underneath all my bleachy highlights). I remember reading something similar about Lindsay Lohan, where her stylist said it took something like 6 visits to get her to platinum blonde.

So maybe the redhead gene explains the color problem, but what about the shampoo? And what about the hairspray? The day of my friend's wedding, my stylist Kristen ended up using nearly an entire can of Sebastian Shaper on my head, to the point that it coated everything from my cell phone to my ears to my shirt...but not my hair. It started out as a quick mist to set the style, but my hair stayed limp and floppy. More and more was added until we were finally confident that everything would stay in place. Kristen joked that on anyone else, that amount of hairspray would have produced a serious case of helmet head.

Now, you saw that hairstyle. By all accounts it did not look shellacked. But I am telling you, a WHOLE CAN of hairspray was in there. And at the end of the night when I took it out, it fell into loose, soft curls, as if no hairspray had ever been there.

It's getting hungrier, friends. Soon I fear it will be on par with Amy Winehouse's hive, which is rumored to be the final destination of all the world's orphan socks. Feed me, Seymour!