My Bizarre Reign as New York’s King of “Virgin Russian Hair”

“It was an irony that blonds for once — at least poor Slavic blonds — were the exploited, and not the exploiters. For someone like me, who had grown up in India, a place colonized and plundered by Europeans, this fact felt empowering in a way. Surely, it felt wrong too, sacrilegious even, but the writer in me was fascinated by the guilty pleasure of selling the very embodiment of whiteness: blond hair. This internal idea that I was embarking on an ambitious literary experiment made it easier to dispense with the ambiguous moral aspects of the venture.”