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cimoreneSo, if you aren't interested in the specifics of bleaching your hair really pale and dyeing it with candy colors, you should just skip this whole post, fair warning.
Of course you never know exactly how the dye is going to turn out - how much of it will take and how it will react to whatever yellow or orangeness is still in your hair. Wax's emerald green dye totally turned a fortuitously gorgeous warm olive when put over the pale tangerine-tinted piss yellow bleach result the last time we dyed all of hers at once. And the dye that looked like those ultramarine-blue-tinted deep purple irises in the bottle turned Coraline-blue on my head and then faded to the perfect lavender.
Well, last night we used Stargazer Royal Blue on Wax, a color whose sample swatch was on the light side of navy blue. Granted, her hair was still a pale pastel lemon-cake yellow when we put it on, but I didn't expect the result to be straight-up teal blue with green streaks where the darker orangey bits were.
We were mostly out of peroxide, and the liquid component was way lower than it should have been so there was far too little dye mixture and Wax, misunderstanding when I asked her to try not to get it on my scalp, put it exclusively on the pre-bleached yellow ends of my hair and completely avoided the three inches of dark brown roots. So the ends turned whitish, and then I rinsed that off and used the remnants of her drugstore "blonding" box kit (these are cheaper, and also less intensely bleachy, so Wax prefers to use them on her hair, which doesn't need heavy-duty peroxide, she says). But we'd already used the first part of it on her head probably an hour prior, and the bleach mixture had evidently started to degrade by the time I got around to applying it to my hair. It was foamy and intensely gritty, sandy even, all over.
The good news is that it did still lighten my hair, and it didn't burn my scalp! The bad news is that I ran out before I could do all the roots so some of the roots on the side were still actually totally brown.
So then I applied Crazy Color Aubergine and left it on 45 minutes instead of the recommended 30, which usually serves me well with hair dye.
The color of the dye itself, when applied to my hair instead of just glimpsed in the bottle, was strongly reminiscent of pickled beets, and I was already starting to suspect it was beets. I'm now positive that it was on the basis of its staining properties, because our entire bathroom floor is currently still a sort of mixture of Barbie pink and magenta splash shapes. Not only that, it was just as stubborn about staining my head. I turned the water cool (I was kinda shivering so I didn't want it actually arctic) and turned my head upside down to rinse until it ran clear like usual, but I had to give up after a few minutes, and just turn the water warmer when it stopped running INTENSE RED PURPLE and was just sort of running various intensities of pink. And then I stood in the shower, turning my head this way and that and trying to lift and masssage the hair in case that would help, for... probably half an hour before I had to give up on it EVER running clear. It just got to a sort of mostly-clear stage, with pink droplets from time to time, and I conditioned twice and got out of there. Actually, it's probably good that beets have so much staining power, because as far as I can make out you can't actually see the brown roots at present.
The result is... like a Barbie box, but slightly purpler. Kinda magenta, but with some darker bits and some lighter neon pink bits. It looks pretty neat, but I'm going to have to try to condition it a lot. It turned out lighter than I wanted, but fortunately not in a way that clashes with my bridesmaid dress. It's about the same hue, just a lighter value.
Pictures forthcoming some day when there is natural light left when I wake up.
Of course you never know exactly how the dye is going to turn out - how much of it will take and how it will react to whatever yellow or orangeness is still in your hair. Wax's emerald green dye totally turned a fortuitously gorgeous warm olive when put over the pale tangerine-tinted piss yellow bleach result the last time we dyed all of hers at once. And the dye that looked like those ultramarine-blue-tinted deep purple irises in the bottle turned Coraline-blue on my head and then faded to the perfect lavender.
Well, last night we used Stargazer Royal Blue on Wax, a color whose sample swatch was on the light side of navy blue. Granted, her hair was still a pale pastel lemon-cake yellow when we put it on, but I didn't expect the result to be straight-up teal blue with green streaks where the darker orangey bits were.
We were mostly out of peroxide, and the liquid component was way lower than it should have been so there was far too little dye mixture and Wax, misunderstanding when I asked her to try not to get it on my scalp, put it exclusively on the pre-bleached yellow ends of my hair and completely avoided the three inches of dark brown roots. So the ends turned whitish, and then I rinsed that off and used the remnants of her drugstore "blonding" box kit (these are cheaper, and also less intensely bleachy, so Wax prefers to use them on her hair, which doesn't need heavy-duty peroxide, she says). But we'd already used the first part of it on her head probably an hour prior, and the bleach mixture had evidently started to degrade by the time I got around to applying it to my hair. It was foamy and intensely gritty, sandy even, all over.
The good news is that it did still lighten my hair, and it didn't burn my scalp! The bad news is that I ran out before I could do all the roots so some of the roots on the side were still actually totally brown.
So then I applied Crazy Color Aubergine and left it on 45 minutes instead of the recommended 30, which usually serves me well with hair dye.
The color of the dye itself, when applied to my hair instead of just glimpsed in the bottle, was strongly reminiscent of pickled beets, and I was already starting to suspect it was beets. I'm now positive that it was on the basis of its staining properties, because our entire bathroom floor is currently still a sort of mixture of Barbie pink and magenta splash shapes. Not only that, it was just as stubborn about staining my head. I turned the water cool (I was kinda shivering so I didn't want it actually arctic) and turned my head upside down to rinse until it ran clear like usual, but I had to give up after a few minutes, and just turn the water warmer when it stopped running INTENSE RED PURPLE and was just sort of running various intensities of pink. And then I stood in the shower, turning my head this way and that and trying to lift and masssage the hair in case that would help, for... probably half an hour before I had to give up on it EVER running clear. It just got to a sort of mostly-clear stage, with pink droplets from time to time, and I conditioned twice and got out of there. Actually, it's probably good that beets have so much staining power, because as far as I can make out you can't actually see the brown roots at present.
The result is... like a Barbie box, but slightly purpler. Kinda magenta, but with some darker bits and some lighter neon pink bits. It looks pretty neat, but I'm going to have to try to condition it a lot. It turned out lighter than I wanted, but fortunately not in a way that clashes with my bridesmaid dress. It's about the same hue, just a lighter value.
Pictures forthcoming some day when there is natural light left when I wake up.
