My hair has been dyed for the last 10 years. For the most part it has been red or red/brown, and at other times it has been white, yellow, blue, green, black, and pink. Most recently it’s been pink into brown (ie faded black) ombre, and I haven’t done my roots in 6 months.
My main reason is laziness. To get my hair pink, as you may have read, I have to dye my roots light blond first, and then the pink dye is a totally separate process. It’s a pain in the ass. I hate it. It’s bullshit and I didn’t want to do it anymore, so I just stopped. That has been leaving me looking a little… blah.
Before, with 6 months of root.
Mr. Strange has been wanting to see me go blond pretty much forever, since that’s my natural color and the color it was when he first met me. He also just likes change. I’ve been feeling a little less than fabulous lately, so I decided to take the plunge and try to go from pink-brown to blond at home. Brave, I most definitely am.
So here’s what I used to do this. As you know, I HATE bleach. I don’t mean I have anything specific against it, it’s not like it’s ever done anything to hurt me personally. But it’s harsh and I’m afraid to use it so I just don’t. Instead, I used Color B4, which is a color stripper, which I had had lying around for a few months. By some miracle I was also able to find a dye in my exact natural shade (natural medium ash blond), and on sale for 7$.
The way Color B4 works is by shrinking the color molecules in your hair, so that they just rinse away. It doesn’t do anything to lighten your base color, so it’s really safe and doesn’t do anything you don’t want it to. But now here’s where things for me got weird.
Umm…WTF?
Absolutely no blue dye was used in the making of this photo.
Through either some fluke of science or sorcery that I don’t understand, it turned my hair blue. Explain that one, Bill Nye! But it wasn’t some deep rich blue. It looked like it had been a deep rich blue at least 6 months ago and I had now started my own squeegee-ing business. Luckily I stayed totally relaxed about the whole thing (I had been considering doing blue ends anyway) and just went ahead with everything as planned, putting the dye on top of it. I cannot be stopped.
Almost immediately the blue faded away into a nice deep blond. Now let me tell you, the Color B4 was no picnic in that tiny bathroom. It smelled kind of like an open sewer. But it had nothing on the dye. An impenetrable wall of eye-watering toxic stench formed around me and I had to escape to the living room a couple times to catch my breath. I have never experienced anything that bad, so thank god I never have to use it ever again. In Clairol’s defense however, I must say the color turned out spectacular.
After. About 20$ spent and no trip to the salon required. Am I good at this or what?
I didn’t bother with the roots, because why, and I can see absolutely no demarcation line between them and the dye. The color is not only exactly the same, but just like the box promised it has many tones in it so it looks totally natural. Nice! Well after all, I guess they did owe me after subjecting me to that stink.
I am super happy with the way my hair looks, super proud of myself for making this work on my own, and especially super happy that with my hair back to natural I will no longer be required to do any root upkeep. My current plan is to go ahead and continue playing with color on the bottom half, leaving the top half the hell alone so that dye jobs only have to happen when I want them to, not when I need them to. I would definitely call this a success.
Skirting The Issue 