From pink to blonde!

Finished product with some Hairspray clip in extensions

After months of being pink I decided it was time to join the realm of the fully fledged grown ups and dye my hair a natural colour. I did toy with the idea of an autumn red colour, but after years of running away from my ginger roots, I finally decided to go for blonde.

Before

The process of going from pink to blonde was always going to cause damage to my hair, so before reaching for the bleach I spent weeks growing and washing out the pink. There was a lot of pink build up so I would shampoo my hair twice every time I showered. The day I bleached it there was barely any pink left from the ends up to about my ears, but my crown was still fairly pink.

To bleach out the pink I used a powder bleach and 12% peroxide I got in Terrisales. I left it my roots and crown for about 7-10 minutes,  then brought it down to the ends. I new the result was going to be a bit yucky, yellow-y, a real mish mash of colours. After washing out the bleach I used the John Frieda full repair mask on my hair just to minimize the damage.

After the first bleach (also make up free, gasp!!)

I knew I wanted to darken the colour, it was just far too bright for my skin tone. I settled on this L'Oreal Preference dye in 9.13 light beige blonde. I picked this because it was darker than the colour my hair was, but still a nice light blonde. I left it in for the 30 minutes as stated in the instructions. While it was developing I was convinced my hair was getting a greyish tinge and started to get very worried! But it washed out blonde. 

And below is the end result! It's going to take some getting used to, but I do really like it! I think im going to stick with natural colours from now on. .... but I've said that many times before! 

After L'Oreal Preference Beige blonde

My hair had repaired itself quite a bit while it was pink, because the bulk of it was only ever getting touched up with Crazy color,  which is a conditioning colour. I was worried about undoing all that progress, but thankfully it doesn't look or feel to bad at all!  It'll be getting lots of extra tlc over the coming weeks. 

Dying extensions with Schwarzkopf Live Colour XXL 00B Max Blonde

Time for an experiment! Not so long ago I dyed my hair from pillar box red to chocolate brown, but it turns out that I'll always be a red head at heart! So after about 2 months of brown hair, I gave in and bleached he bejayziz out of my poor hair and am now a red head again! Yaay!! But unfortunately, during my adventures as a brunette, I spent about €70 on hair extensions (1 pack of 16", 1 pack of 22"). So now I'm stuck with 2 bags of brown hair extensions, that I love, and a head full of red hair!

I used Schwarzkopf Live Colour XXL 00B to bleach my own hair, and it worked! So I figured, if it worked for me, it might just work for my chocolate brown extensions! Nothing ventured, nothing gained!

There's normally a pretty immediate change in colour when you apply the dye, it's small but noticeable! But there was nothing shifting in the extensions. Seeing as it wasn't 'living' hair, I decided to leave the dye on longer than the recommended 40 minutes. I left the dye to do it's job and checked on them 60 minutes later.

And, what did I find.....Not a lot to be brutally honest. To my eye they looked basically the same!

Then I looked very, very.....very closely. There is a slight change in some strands, but nothing light enough to take red dye :(

I reckon if I went at them with about 4 more boxes of dye it might eventually lighten them enough to dye them a similar red to my own hair, but that's a lot of time and money! 

Mission status: Failed!

Anyone wanna buy some....slightly used hair extensions?.....No?...Didn't think so!