The Jury is Still Out

I’m not sure about the “karma” on this one.

I’m turning gray. It’s kind of pretty sometimes. I’m getting the sort of streaks that I admired in my step-mother, starting at the crown of my head and going under by my ears. Her graying was beautiful. Mine is okay. Sometimes I like to back it off a bit so I buy a temporary coloring. I don’t use it all the time, but whenever the mood hits me, I put it on my grey streaks and they are less noticeable for a while. It washes out after five or six shampooing, but at least it doesn’t have the complications of having to worry about roots showing and that sort of thing. The color fades away gently and I’m back to where I was, until I feel like coloring it again.

I went to the store where I buy the coloring, and the woman sold me a product that she said was the same thing. I was in a bit of a hurry, so I took her word for it and bought it. Both what I bought before and this product are about the same price. Since it’s not something I really need, I’m sometimes bothered about the price of spending on luxuries like this, but I don’t really shop that often. (My over-spending of things tend to be with buying organic vegetables and that sort of thing.)

I took the product home, read the instructions carefully and it wasn’t at all the same thing. I’d already talked myself into buying something I didn’t absolutely need, and then it wasn’t even the right thing. I wasn’t sure if I could return it. Was it a cosmetic, in which case, no, I couldn’t, or was it like anything that you buy (still sealed in its original packaging) which you could? I went back to the store. The same woman was there who talked me into buying the wrong thing. She was helping another customer. There were a ton of people. I didn’t feel like arguing my point.

So I walked up to the shelf, put back the wrong product, took the right one, and left the store.

This was wrong in so many ways. It was basically shoplifting. However, the wrong product was untouched (I can verify that I didn’t do anything outside of put it in a bag, take it home, read the instructions on the bottle carefully, then take it back.)

What is sort of okay about my actions is that the wrong product would have gone in the trash and created more waste in a world full of waste, when I was already wasting resources with my vain coloring of my gray hair.

I’m really not sure about the karma on this one. What counts more, the store policy or not wasting something that someone else might want to use?

So I’m letting this one sit for a while. Often when I feel this way, I do something categorically good (like sending money to a worthy organization) to make me feel better about myself. That’s next on the list to do today.