Tag Archives: hair
Adventures in Hair Coloring
This weekend I did something I’ve never done before…I dyed my own hair! I have had my hair dyed by professionals off and on since I was about 16, but I’ve always been too broke/lazy to do anything that requires a lot of touch up and upkeeping. I don’t even blow dry my hair 99% of the time, so actually touching up my hair every 6 weeks isn’t really a feasible idea for my life.
Back in June I visited my sister, who happens to be finishing up cosmetology school in Santa Barbara. We had a lot of fun and she made me wear all these fun outfits I would never wear in San Francisco (see photo!) where it is perpetually foggy.
Those legs don't see sun. Evar.
On my last day there, she also gave my hair a makeover into the “ombre” look. Initially I loved the dip-dye effect of it all, but I thought that I would never be able to pull it off. But then my sister told me that because you don’t really have any roots, it is super easy to keep! So I begged her to dye my hair. I will NEVER do it again (there was a lot of pain involved in achieving the look) but the good news is that touching the color up is a million times less painful. Yays!
I decided it was time to change things up a little bit because my ends were getting a little off-color and too blonde/brassy. Just kind of icky. Oh and the ends were kinda/really dry. I mean the color was fine back in June, but sun exposure and shampoos and water will all start to change the color of things and I just wasn’t feeling the direction the color was going. (Luckily I do not work in a conservative environment, or I would not have been able to pull off this hair in the first place!) I told my sister and she mailed me some supplies. She suggested that I add an all-0ver demi-permanament red to my hair to make everything shiny and smooth and even out the brassy tones in my hair.
Mirror photo! I was so preoccupied with trying to figure out how to dye my hair that I forgot that I could turn the camera around and just take a photo of myself. Oops.
Except, she didn’t mail me an INSTRUCTIONS probably because she sent me professional stuff and usually they already know what to do and how to use everything. Oops. So after a few hundred text messages between me and my sister, and a promise to my mother that I would go see a professional to fix things if I screw it up, I finally decided to stop walking around pretending my hair looked the way it used to, and just own up and dye my hair.
Of course I was warned about a bajillion times that dye stains EVERYTHING and my bathroom is WHITE so I had to make some preparations….I took out anything that I cared about and filled up a washbasin with soap and water to clean up any spills and then I covered up anything I didn’t want to stain.
My poor roommate had brush her teeth and use the toilet twice while I was setting this up.
Then I had to mix the dye up (I made WAY too much!) and start applying it to my body. I mean hair. Although a lot of it did end up on my face/neck/arms in the process! I pretty much just had to paint it onto damp hair, let it sit for a while, and shampoo it out. Way easier than the intial ombre process (let’s just say that my scalp does not take kindly to my hair being “teased” with a rat tail comb) although about halfway through I began to wonder if it wouldn’t just be better to (once again) pay someone else to do all of this – what can I say, I love DIY, but when they require me to cover up my entire (shared) bathroom I begin to think that it would be nice to treat myself to a salon!
It looked like I was bleeding all over the place or had possibly killed someone recently.
In the end, it turned out pretty good and I am happy with the result. I am also happy that I saved $65-$100, which is what a salon visit would have cost me (and another $50 if I had decided to get a cut as well!). I am not advocating that we all stop patronizing salons (after all, they are trained professionals, and sometimes you really need that) but since we don’t have any doctors (I am still paying for a visit I had in April) or carpenters (can you imagine the custom furniture I could design and build!) or accountants (my small business needs one) in the family, you gotta take advantage of the perks that you do have!
Ta-da! Hair color corrected and over all a little bit darker and more red. It really completes my fall vampire look.
On top of that, I now know that I can actually dye my hair like tons of women do all the time. I am pretty challenged with makeup and hair and all sorts of other things and I tend to live in this little bubble where I think I look a certain way (fabulous all the time) but really I look a different way (tired and pale). Hair and makeup are more of my sister’s thing, but she lives 350 miles away…now I don’t have to wait six months to update my appearance. Yay for empowerment! Next step: learn how to use a curling iron.
Link Up: Hair Products!
Oh hey so…I’m doing a little link up with Leonora at Yellow Heart Art because she is full of awesome and I’ve enjoyed reading all her stuff about hair. This week’s theme is hair PRODUCTS.
So, I should start with this: I’m terrible at doing my own hair, but I get away with it because I have fabulous tresses. I don’t mean to sound super full of myself, but ever since I was a little girl I’ve been told I have great hair so I just assume I do…haha! One of my mom’s sisters still tells me I have fab hair (which is hard to pull off, considering my supercool sister is attending the Paul Mitchell school and always has the best hair ever).
My hair after my last dye job. It's like three inches longer now.
So yeah my hair…it’s dark brown and super straight. I have a TON of hair and it is pretty fine. I get the fine-ness from my mama and the amount of hair from my father. It fades into a caramel color if I’m in the sun (like when I played on the golf team in high school — free highlights and checking out boys in polos all day, THAT was the life) but I generally like to die it a shade darker since my eyebrows are black. ((If you were wondering what I looked like back in the golf team days, you’ll have to wonder some more. I can’t find any photos in my apartment.))
I had my sister put a purple streak in my hair (the technical term is “peekaboo”) but that faded out and now it’s just a bleached streak. It looks kinda cool though, if you can forget that it’s totally growing out because my sister did this in November. I am contemplating the “ombre” look but I’ll probably chicken out. And…wow I didn’t know I could talk on and on about my hair like that.
Okay so now you get my hair type and all that. The reason why I say I’m terrible at my hair is because 9 times out of 10, I won’t style it. Sure I’ll comb it, but that is about it. It takes too long to blow dry (30 minutes!). It takes even longer to curl. So unless a random ponytail is really in, I don’t do a lot in terms of styling my hair. (The fact that I don’t blow dry it helps keep it healthier longer, which means I can also go longer between trims. Laziness pays off, people.)
On the rare occasion that I DO blow dry my hair, this is what I use:
Dove Volumizing Mousse! Yeah!
I just started using it a month ago, but I love that it pretty much does what it is supposed to. It helps give my hair some “bounce” so that it isn’t STICK STRAIGHT at the ends. And it makes all the time/effort I spend on blow drying last an extra day, cause usually I can wake up the next day and have great hair (all it needs is a little dry shampoo. Dry shampoo is basically baby powder or corn starch but it does its job so well!)
Surely you aren’t surprised that it’s a drugstore brand. I’m not shelling out $15 for something I rarely use…teehee. But while we are on the subject of rare things, I’ve decided that my hair needs to be cut. So I’ll probably make an appointment in a month. Exciting!
Wanna get in on all this hair-centric link-y goodness? Yeah!
Check it out here:
