Comment cacher des mèches roses à tes parents

What does “mèches” mean in French?

Cheveux is your hair in general, but une mèche is a single lock or strand — and les mèches are the dyed streaks a salon paints in, what English calls highlights. So faire des mèches is “to get highlights.” Knowing this lets you ask for exactly the look you want at a coiffeur instead of pointing: a few pink mèches, not a whole new head of colour.

In the clip a teenager separates her secretly-dyed mèches roses from the rest of her cheveux and tucks them down the back of her shirt to hide them from her parents — a perfect picture of a mèche as one isolatable strand. The word stretches far beyond the salon: une mèche is also a candle wick or a bomb’s fuse, which feeds the idiom vendre la mèche, literally “to sell the wick” but meaning “to let the cat out of the bag.” It descends from Late Latin micca, an alteration of Latin myxa (“lamp nozzle, wick”).