Do not attempt this at home: A hair dying adventure.

Let me preface this post with saying I am in no way telling you how to dye your hair. It is more just an insight of what can go wrong when you dye your hair at home and how I fixed it. It’s a laughing at my own expense. A tongue in cheek, if you will. And please laugh at my expense as well.

I’ve been dying my hair since I was 16 years old. It’s never been crazy colours, but it’s gone from brown to blonde back to brown to almost black and then all the colours in between. With 30+ years under my belt, you’d think I would be a pro. There have some great results and some not so great results, but never something I couldn’t live with, until now.

For years my motto was “Blonde hair with dark roots – acceptable. Dark hair with grey/white roots – not acceptable.” This was just a weird insecurity I had. And since the pandemic, I’ve seen many women totally rock the roots. So that being said, I was always dying my hair. For years I stayed fairly blonde because it hid the grey better when it grew in.

A few years back, I decided I didn’t want to fight the fight anymore and started to grow out my natural hair. It was a long and tedious adventure. And once I had quite a bit of grey grown out, I chopped my hair so I could grow it completely natural.

That lasted about 3 months, tops. I envy women that can go completely grey and can look younger than they did before. For me, it just aged me. So instead of going back to a blonde tone, nope, I made the decision to take it back brown. Dark brown.

If you can’t already tell, when it comes to my hair, I clearly lack any sane decision making. And before you ask, why don’t I stick to the professionals. I won’t lie, it’s the cost and the time. As soon as I see white roots, I don’t wait long until I cover it up. I’ve got the single Mom income with a wealthy women’s hair needs.

Suffering with roots though the pandemic wasn’t so bad, because everyone else was. But as things start opening up, my neurotic tendencies with my hair came back. I was starting to think that as much as I liked the brown tones, maintenance with blonder hair would probably be easier on me. And this is where my trouble this time began.

See what I mean by the grey roots?

In the years I have been dying my hair, I know that with at home colouring, you can’t go from a dark brown to a blonde with one dye job. You have to gradually get lighter. So I thought that maybe if I put in some highlights, it would help hide the grey but also give me a bit of lighter look. Seems reasonable, right? So I enlisted a good friend to help me with this process.

I got the dye kit. One of those old fashion ones that have the cap to pull out the hightlights. If nothing else, we spent some time catching up.

And so it begins.

We followed the directions properly. So it was definitely no fault of that. And when we were finished, at first it didn’t look too bad when it was wet. Maybe a little brassy for my liking but nothing I didn’t think a good purple shampooing wouldn’t fix.

I left my friend’s house and headed home to use the purple shampoo. I saturated my hair, left it in for 15+ minutes and was sure all was good and washed it out.

My first reaction again when it was wet, was that it wasn’t too bad. Still a bit brassy, but livable. And then it started to dry. And the more it dried, the more I started to resemble a bit of a pumpkin. And resembling a pumpkin, unless it’s your chosen Halloween costume, is never a good thing.

I’ve ended up with brassiness before, I even tried going from blonde back to brown and end up with a tinge of green, but never quite this bad. At this point, I was praying for another lockdown so I wouldn’t be able to go out in public. It was that orange.

I couldn’t get a picture that quite did it justice.

I can tell you one thing, I was not cutting this sh$t out. It had taken me too long to grow my hair back. And friends, if I ever say I want to cut my hair short again, slap some sense into me.

So what do I do at this point??? Well of course, Google to the rescue. As I somewhat suspected, I would need to completely re-dye my hair with an ash tone. There were suggestion of bringing in the professionals, but there was no time or budget for that.

I decided to sleep on it, but unfounded dreams that it would magically correct itself overnight. A girl can dream, right?

The next morning, I headed off to get myself another box of dye. I am not going to lie, when I was beyond nervous that this could not work. It was probably the longest 30 minutes of my life.

Not one of my finer moments.

After I washed it out, I knew there was some good in the world. My dreams of going lighter had been diminished for a bit but at lest the grey was now covered and didn’t resemble a Florida orange grove.

So what did I learn from this…..not much…nothing I didn’t already know but chose to ignore. When it comes to my hair, I know what I have to do to get to the results I want, and that takes time and patience (which I don’t have a lot of). Skipping steps for a faster result, isn’t going to work, EVER.

What is your takeaway from all of this? I am not the person you come to when you want to change your hair.

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