"Would you straighten your hair? The you that lives through your backstory will still be you."

"I mean, no, I absolutely would not." She makes a thoughtful noise. "So what if something about the magic or technology of the setting made it very very easy to change hairstyles? Such that I could decide to turn naturally straight hair into naturally curly and have no trouble once I got past the mind control?"

"Personally I think I'll just take the eight feet of hair. It even comes with a maid!"

"I might also take eight feet of hair..."

"To be clear, it isn't literally just eight feet of hair, it's any hairstyle ridiculous enough that the maid is legitimately useful in maintaining it. You can be other forms of absurdly overelaborate." 

"Good to know, I suppose..." 

"If you are really absolutely determined to maintain your current hairstyle while also choosing the hime-cut style, that specific workaround could plausibly work. But. I only have so much leeway to bend the rules before my boss calls shenanigans, and that would spend a lot of it." 

"Wait, which workaround? The one where we make permanent hairstyle changes very easy for everyone?"

"With the explicit intention of completely divorcing your mechanical choices from any kind of hair-related reality." Sigh. "I'm sorry. Think of it as though there was a GM who cared about the map having a certain minimum resemblance to the territory. And I'm not the GM." 

"Now I'm offended on behalf of all the people who hypothetically can't have easy hairstyle changes just because I happen to be an unrepentant munchkin who's really attached to my curls."

She chews thoughtfully on her lip for a few seconds.

"...what if we make it so that hairstyle has an actual magical effect on personality within the universe, and make hairstyle easy to change, and then the hairstyle and the mechanical benefits come as a package and it's up to me whether I want to keep them?"

"What, and implicitly force me to have ringlets if I want an intimidating laugh?"

"I'm sure we can figure out a tidy compromise on the details."

"The Elaborate hairstyle comes with a maid minion," the angel points out. "I could give you the easy hair-changing magic if you hadn't brought it up specifically in order to munchkin with it."

"Are you really so offended by the idea of having to buy this perk that you want instead of getting it for free with your hairstyle? Because she hasn't even said anything about what effects hair color has that you'll have to wrangle in order to continue to be a brunette."

"The part that offends me isn't the cost of the perk, it's the fact that because I brought it up in order to munchkin with it, having easy hairstyle changes is more costly than it would otherwise be. I like my hair a lot! My hair is important to me! I want to have my hair without taking mechanical penalties for it! If that means I have to invent an entire hair-related magic system on the spot, then we are all damn well going to sit here talking about hair until I've worked it out! —do explain the hair colour effects, though, they'll probably be relevant to developing the hair-related magic system."

"It's not that--I'll explain after. The hair colors are, as I said earlier, blonde, redhead, silver, brunette, and rainbow. Blonde is the stereotypical rich girl alpha bitch 'blondes have more fun' hair color and has essentially negligible effects on anything. Redhead can mean orange or actually red, the trope of the fiery redhead means that choosing red hair will amplify your emotions, as well as boosting your physical prowess and martial aptitude a bit. Silver hair, by contrast, makes you a bit weaker relative to baseline and boosts your intelligence, artistic creativity and/or magical aptitude, due to something of a mystic association. 'Brunette' means brown or black, essentially, and is considered the 'everywoman' hair color just due to statistical plentifulness. Choosing brunette will give you a boost to relatableness, even to those of lower station, and mildly ding your 'assertiveness and proactivity,' although I have yet to squeeze an answer out of anyone as to what exactly that means or to see it meaningfully impede anyone. 'Rainbow' hair means any color or combination of colors not covered here, including multi-colored hair of various, pun intended, stripes. Rainbow hair will essentially inflict your world with anime tropes." 

"That's an obnoxious set of options but all right. What were you going to explain?"

"It's not that a magic system which lets you switch around hairstyles more easily will be more expensive because you want to munchkin with it, it's that if you announce your intention to have the hairstyle you have now, but you decide that you want to choose a silver hime-cut for the mechanical perks and have it for five minutes to pay lip service to it and have your regular hairstyle the rest of the time, my bosses will say 'hm, nope' and give you the mechanical attributes of the hairstyle you intend to actually have. And I can maybe sneak it past them if there's almost zero other munchkining in your build."

"I want my current hair. My current hair does not match any of the available options; out of all of them it's apparently the closest to 'drill hair', which offers me a free perk that I actively don't want. I would like to keep my current hair without being needlessly disadvantaged by losing out on the 'free perk or minion' benefit that everyone else is getting by not caring about their hair as much as I do. Silk Hiding Steel is, essentially, a mildly useful minor amplification of the personality I already have. If I invent a hair-based magic system that makes those effects concretely granted by the hairstyle itself, and assign my current hair a different mildly useful minor amplification of the personality I already have that does not appear in your perks list, then change my hair back as soon as I can and accept the loss of the perk along with it, I end up with everything I want and I don't actually even think I'm being that much of a munchkin."

"So passionate," Ghys murmurs, amused.

"I'm not saying you're being unreasonable! But it doesn't matter if I think you're being reasonable or not, because I am not the final authority! If I were, I wouldn't be sending you off to gratuitous romantic drama in a mandatory monarchy!"

"I think your hair would be even cooler if it were impractically long," Didyme offers helplessly. 

"What I want is not for you to tell me how reasonable I'm being and how helpless you are to work outside the rules you're given, what I want is for you to work with me on accomplishing my goals. Unless by the mere fact of having goals and wanting them accomplished I've already doomed myself to be seen as a munchkin who can't have nice things, in which case I guess I want something else. I would be fine with trying to find a compromise that works with the intended spirit of the mechanics if I had any idea how to do that."

Sigh. "I'm sorry. I'm trying to tell you what constraints I'm working under and therefore that you are working under. The thing I want to try to prevent is you coming up with a very clever solution that completely fails to work."

"So: what, concretely, is the problem?"