My friend Dawn (queen of good-natured peer pressure) has been working on me for months to cut my hair. “You should go back to a bob,” she says. Andreas has always preferred my hair short, so he always nods in agreement when this conversation comes up.

My response is always the same: “Not this year.” The braids are suuuuper low maintenance. I wake up, un-braid, comb my hair out, rebraid, and forget about it. It’s always the same, usually looks tidy, and stays out of my face. I wash it twice a month. I never really have bad hair days because it’s always tied away in two plaits. Easy! Peasy!

Plus, I’m still promoting this book and doing appearances and shit and the braids are, well, branding. Is that gross? Does that make me a whore? Will you still be my friend? Regardless, if there was any doubt in my mind as to the effectiveness of the braided branding, it was erased this morning in Vancouver.

I had a butt-crack-of-dawn interview on a morning show called Breakfast TV. Immediately afterwards, I headed to a local cafe to get a chai fix. The woman behind me in line touched my arm.

“You were just on TV, weren’t you?” she said.

I laughed. “Is the orangey TV makeup that much of a give away?”

“No, no,” she said. “I recognized the braids.”

Now THAT, friends, is a solid ROI.