My journey through stupidity

I came here quite a while ago now asking for a little advise on how to remove nuclear red from my hair. Though I did also confess to having been a lurker for quite some time too. You guys have helped me in so many ways, most of it unknowingly! Anyway, I thought it was time I remembered to show you all your hard work!

Early this year, I had box dyed black hair but in previous years I'd always been pillar box red so I figured I knew what I was doing.. Right? Wrong! I used a colour b4, which turned my hair into an orangey, knotted mess! Then did two 40 vol bleaches right after the other.. I know, right?! Let me break to mention at this point, that I'm very lucky to have very thick, very strong hair, but what I did was unbelievably stupid and to this day I still don't know how I managed to get away with only needing to have a few of inches chopped off.

Anyways, I then dyed my hair blue (I think it was a mix of Atlantic and Blue Lagoon) but oh my word, the transfer! I looked like a smurf.. And so did my baby.. And my husband! That's about when I found you guys, trying to find a solution

I let the blue fade, then bleach bathed to Virgin Rose.

After a couple of months I decided to bleach bath the Virgin Rose.. And again. And again. There's just no getting I'd of that! So I decided to go red.. This was a mix of nuclear red and candy apple over virgin rose. 

I kept the red for a couple of months, but faded it using I love juicy. I used two decolour removers, which did precisely nothing. I did two bleach baths (a week apart) with xxl max blond. Which dyed my roots and nothing else. I lived with this hair for THREE weeks!

I finally got completely fed up and after three weeks did a full strand test using Indola and 6% (20 vol) The test went fine so I bleached my full head. It worked perfectly. I ended up a lovely light blond with pinkish streaks. Over which I dyed chunks of heavily diluted turquoise, pink, purple and lilac.

Since then, I've had a haircut and aside from a quick top up of dye I've done nothing to it. So I'm readying for a BB this weekend, and changing the colours. Though I'm still not sure what colours to do yet.

I guess this is more of a cautionary tale than anything, I'd never recommend anyone make the mistakes I did. And despite not causing too much damage, I have in fact, lost nearly a foot of hair length this year to make sure everything is in tip top condition.

Sorry for the posey pictures..