Before and After

It’s time for yet another chapter in my wonderful hair story. My hair has been dyed too many times to count. It’s been everything from Strawberry blonde to black. It’s been a short little chin-length cut, and halfway down my back. Thankfully, though, I’ve never had a bob or shaved it all of. However, I’ve even received chili-bowl haircuts as a child (thanks mom and dad), complete with my dad combing it exactly like his hair when my mom was out of town. Talk about traumatic. I even blow dry it daily and use a good mix of my straightener and curling irons regularly.

So needless to say, my hair hates me. I don’t think I’ve had more than half a dozen good hair days in my entire life. And technically, part of it is genetics – my dad has thin hair – but I have put it though a lot of abuse over the years.

Long enough story short, my hair has really been getting long and I haven’t had it cut for a while. So it was long and probably not really healthy. I took the big “plunge” and told the lady to chop off all the bad stuff.

So...Before (not my best shot, but shows how badly I needed a cut):

After:

Mission Accomplished

Hair Crisis Averted!!

I was able to get in and out of the salon in only 3 hours! Which is great, considering I was thinking 4-5 hours.

The "color stripping" process took about the first hour. He applied some kind of chemical to remove the color, and then after rinsing it out the first time, applied it a second time. It's not that he screwed up, but apparently I had enough color in my hair that the first attempt didn't remove it all. So his second attempt was to get the remaining color out. At that point, my hair pretty much looked like a tiger. Nice copper/orange and some brownish/black areas. It actually looked pretty cool, but I was pretty sure that wouldn't go over well at the office.

So he had to dye my hair with a shade that matched my original hair color. Then the last 1 hr 45 min to 2 hours was coloring and letting it set in my hair. Then the rest of the time was spent shapooing, rinsing, and blow drying my hair. And let me just say, blow drying at the salon takes about 30 minutes, because they do it in sections. If he'd just let me do it (and he had to blow dry it 3 separate times), I would have been out of there in 2 hours!
The final product was a medium/dark brown that is actually a bit darker than my natural hair color. However, over the next 5-6 weeks, the color will begin to fade, causing my hair to lighten, and then it will be more like my real color. And it's close enough in color that when my roots start to go in again, it shouldn't be as obvious.
So I've learned my lesson. Save my money, and see the professionals!!

Hair Trauma Drama

So, for those of you who don’t know me, I like to dye my hair. I’ve gone blonde, strawberry blonde, brown, dark brown, and most recently, black.

Where I “started” at in college… (I think this is my real hair color!)

When you use blonde on brown hair, you get a weird mix of blonde and red, depending on the light you’re standing under. In this one, it’s yellowish-orange.

Dark Brown – either mid to late ’07

And finally black – back around Thanksgiving ‘08

Because I do it myself at home, with kits, I always have the potential of it not working out. I’ve always had pretty good luck, actually, with having it turn out to a normal hair color (at least on someone on this planet!) And this last time, the black looked o.k. for a while, but I think I’m over it. Plus, my roots have started showing, and they were my natural medium brown. Needless to say, brown and black are VERY different, especially when they’re right next to each other.

A few weeks ago, I decided since my roots were showing, that I’d dye my hair brown again to bring it back to its “original state”. However, since my roots and actual hair were technically 2 different colors when I used the overall color, and you CAN’T lighten black, the hair dye DYED them 2 different shades. So now I look like a skunk. Not very acceptable for a professional workspace. What’s a girl to do?

Well, I had to call my hairdresser and a local salon to see what I could do, since obviously I shouldn’t be trusted to fix this on my own. The common suggestion soon became “color correction”, which basically involves stripping my hair of the dye color until I get back to my “real” hair color. It is a 2-4 hour process, at minimum, so I should expect to be there for a while. I go into the salon at 1 pm tomorrow, and I’m supposed to be paired with a Hair Coloring “Expert”. I enjoy going and getting my hair done, usually, so let’s hope that 5 hours of sitting around and having my hair pulled or my scalp burning won’t ruin this experience for me!

And believe me, NO MORE HOME DYE JOBS! And especially not black! I’m actually thinking of saving up and going back to blonde highlights once in a while. Which will be tasteful (I did this in high school, and I liked it) and will be done by professionals! But that will be down the road, once my hair has “settled down”. (And depending on if I still like hair coloring after tomorrow!)

Of course, there is always a possibility that he could “strip” my hair, and it could leave certain pigments behind. You know, like purple, green, red, blue. Any color really. So it could be a trial and error process to see how long it takes to get back to my real hair. Or “how many strips does it take to get to the center of Karen’s hair issue?”

We’ll see if I still have a job at a fancy 5 Diamond/5 Stars resort, come Monday morning, if they can’t fix it and I look like her!!!