Help? Disaster?!

What I wanted

And what I got..

by the looks of it, they only highlighted your hair and didnt put any red in it. I would go back and complain

dont have the balls to walk in there and tell them they effed up my hair!  :'(

My guess is, they thought you meant just the highlights from the photo. Either they didn't realise you meant you wanted the red or you didn't really explain it properly. You didn't say anything while you were in there and they were drying it?

You can just use some red direct dyes to get that colour now though.

actually i told her i wanted just that, exactly as you saw it, so did she.
i had an all over purple with copper and blonde foils but it looks a bloody mess. im devastated.

if she couldn't get what i asked for  surely she would have said it wasnt possible, but she didnt.

and i had a different person cut and style it,she was busy with another client at this point, but the woman said it will look totally different in natural light as it was dark outside  wait to see in the morning.. but no it isnt any better!

part of me wants to go back and get my moneys worth, but i dont have the balls!

If you don't feel confident enough to go back and have them fix it then I would take Janine's advice and just use some red  direct dyes and do the color yourself, it really shouldn't be that hard since they did the highlighting part for you.

Thanks for your help,
I plucked up enough courage to ask her to correct it, but I'm not even sure she can? she obviously doesn't see the same colours I do or in fact anyone that I show  the images to!  :'( :'( :'(

Perhaps you could ask her if she has any swatch books for the colours she is going to use so she could show you examples of the colours she thinks will achieve the look you want and then you can see if they match what you are visualising?

Basically it is either a case of trying to make sure you and the colourist are on the same page and then trusting her to do it, or trying to fix it yourself with direct dyes as Janine suggested - they are really your two options!

I've had it a few times where they have claimed it's the lighting in the salon showing the wrong colour (once with what was supposed to be platinum blonde and ended up brassy yellow and another time with a colour correction from light blonde to light ash brown that wound up pink!) and I think sometimes they use it as an excuse knowing full well that it isn't the colour they were supposed to do! These were the experiences that led me to learn to colour my own hair! 

could she be colorblind? I know its rarer to have colorblind women but it is a posibility that she cant see the red in the picture. They usually see greens or reds more like brown shades.

That was my thought too. Or, the print/phone photos (how ever you're showing them this photo) just isn't showing the colour correctly. You can see the right colour because you've seen it properly. It's a bit like the blue/black dress. For a long time I could only see it as cream/gold, then one day I saw it on a particular screen and I suddenly saw blue/black. Now, I see blue/black most of the time as my brain has adjusted. If lots of people thought the same, it sounds like it's however you're showing the picture to people isn't displaying it properly.

It's just that the result is so different from what you asked for, I'm sure they're not seeing what we're seeing, for whatever reason.

if you're feeling too anxious to complain to them, is there a way you could email them and email the photo? I hope they sort it for you. I would do what Janine said though, get a direct dye like Directions or Adore or Manic Panic etc and put the red on yourself. It will be a brighter red on the hilighted parts and deeper on the darker parts, like what you originally asked for