What's up with the orange hair?

Wasn't that pau long ago? Wasn't it left behind in the 1980s, back when pre-teen titas would make faux ehu highlights with a bottle of peroxide and a blow dryer set on "fry"?

Lately, hair the color of the burnt-sienna Crayola crayon is back.

And it's not just the women. In fact, it's mostly males. A lot of men are wearing their hair that special shade that can best be called "tita orange."

The college students from Japan who smoke and slouch at the 'Aina-Haina bus stop all have that color hair.

The seventh-grade boys traveling in snickering packs through Pearlridge Uptown all have that color hair.

The Pop Warner coaches with the oversized windbreakers that make their legs look longer, their shoulders look wider and their opus look smaller — under their baseball caps, they have a patch of that orange-colored hair like a crop circle or the burn mark from a UFO landing in a cornfield.

The pretty Golden Retrievers who get their afternoon ride through Niu Valley in the back of an El Camino, they all have that color hair.

But the dogs' color is natural.

Everybody else hit the bottle.

Or the beach.

(Yeah, right.)

But what bottle?

How do you even get your hair that color? It's more than bleach. Bleach will make your hair light. There must be heat or combustion or some sort of chemistry involved in creating exactly that shade of orange.

The color of rust on the corrugated iron roof of a tool shack.

The color of dirt in Olokele on Kaua'i.

The color of sunset on still water, of bantam roosters, of ume, pickled mango and kau yuk floating in saimin.

Not quite Bozo or Ronald McDonald or Raggedy Ann. More orange than red.

But not popsicle or ripe mango or traffic cone orange, either. A little dirtier, muddier, earthier.

Maybe it's the search for endless summer, the hair version of sunless tanning and bronzers.

Maybe it's make-believe, people pretending to be surfers, people who never get to the beach (because they're too busy at home putting junk on their hair).

Maybe it's dark-haired self-loathing, some sort of phenomenon that a smart psych grad student will explore in a thesis.

Maybe it's titas marking their men with bottles of peroxide: "Back off! This one has a tita at home!"

Or maybe it's just cool, and those who don't get it are just sadly out of touch with what looks good.

Those dogs look good.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.