Bride asks for advice about sister whose hair looks like a 'Halloween costume.'

My (26f) wedding is in 3 months. Both of my sisters (Sadie 29f, Olivia 20f) are my MOH’s. My wedding is going to be elegant and big, as groom and I have a lot of friends/family and we’ve always dreamt of an extravagant wedding.

I have a good relationship with both sisters, however my younger sister, Olivia, has made the process a bit difficult as a bridesmaid. I chose a light dusty pink for the color of the bridesmaid dresses and let the girls pick what style they wanted.

Immediately, Olivia says she’s going to feel insecure as she’s so pale and the dress will make her look red. I suggested a spray tan, as the color of the dresses had already been set in stone to match the rest of my wedding, but she said absolutely not (fair).

I didn’t hear anything else about the dresses, but now I’m in a predicament with her again and I’m not sure if I’ve made a mistake for making such a big deal of this.

Olivia regularly highlighted her dark brown hair with blonde for years, but decided about a year ago to grow it out and let it get healthy, meaning no dye.

A month or so in, her hair didn’t look terrible, more like a balayage (editor's note, balayage: a technique for highlighting hair in which the dye is painted on in such a way as to create a graduated, natural-looking effect), but now we’re around the year mark and her roots are straight up brown and there’s a straight line, no blending, of blonde for the last 8 inches of her hair.

Olivia has insisted she has her hair down during the wedding (she doesn't like the way it looks up), however I don’t want her roots and hair on full display during pictures, ceremony and throughout the night.

I love my sister and respect what she wants to do with her hair, however, her hair is an eye sore and I’ve never seen anyone let their hair look like this for this long.

I told her I would pay for anything she wanted done to it, as long as her roots were at least a BIT blended for the wedding. She says that she doesn’t want to put anymore chemicals on it and is leaving it and I won’t change her mind.

I told my hair dresser about Olivia’s POV (we go to the same hairdresser) and she told me that there are plenty of things she can do for her that can make her hair look blended and still be healthy. Olivia still refuses, despite me offering to pay and telling her our hairdresser said she could make subtle changes and preserve her hair.

I should add that her hair is NOT breaking or fried, she simply wanted a break from dying it to get it as healthy as she could and to grow it out.

This day is one of the most important in my life and having someone in my wedding party with unkept roots is something I don’t want. I’m not asking her to cut it or change the color, just blend/transition the colors. She’s irritated because my other sister and mother have told her that she should change it for the sake of not ruining pictures.

AITA here?

Notes, after getting so many YTA votes:

Her dress color WAS made a big deal of until I suggest she can get a spray tan, because I’m not changing the colors of my wedding this close to it. I don’t have enough characters to add in every detail of this fiasco, but it IS dropped now.

Photoshop is a great solution except she’ll be in every picture of the wedding party. That is so time consuming for the photographer that it isn’t realistic.

I don’t expect her to dye her hair completely and put bleach on it again, I just asked her to let our stylist do ANYTHING she can to blend the roots. Stylist said she could easily do a gloss with NON permanent dye and then a hair treatment to ensure her hair is still healthy.

I feel like I’m out of options as everything I’ve suggested to compromise with her, she says no. It’s a big deal to me that her hair doesn’t look like a Halloween costume while I’m spending so much time and money for this event.

Comments:

Left-Car6520 says:

Look to be completely honest if your wedding pictures are the most important thing in your life, to the point where someone else's hair colour is going to bother you enough to fight about it, you really need to re-evaluate your life priorities.

It simply, truly, does not matter that much.

Due_Analyst1931 says:

I don’t agree at all. As someone that is planning my own wedding currently, they are EXPENSIVE! Big or small. And if out grown hair looks sloppy and unkempt, I would 100% expect my sister to do the bare minimum of making it look neater.

Extra-Training-290 says:

I agree. It's her wedding, it should be the way she wants it, not a bratty self entitled sister. Uninvite sis from the bridal party. That way she won't be in any formal pics.

chernaboggles says:

YTA. Nobody cares about this except you. The guests don't care if a bridesmaid has two-toned hair. The wedding pictures will end up in an album that sits out and gets glanced through every couple of years (maybe), or hanging in dusty frames in various family homes.

If it's a big wedding, by your 10th anniversary you won't even remember the names of all your guests or why they were invited.