Sorry in advance for all the skankalicious pictures lol but they're the only ones I still have saved, sorry!
My hair is naturally a dark, extremely ashy blonde, it looks greenish gold under the light and I have always hated it. I dont have any pictures scanned in from before I started dying my hair though. Heres me after a year of dying it black. This was in 2006
Then when I was in cosmetology school I obviously could not stand having one solid color or long layers, I felt it was way too boring at the time so I bleached parts and put fire engine red in. You cant really see it here because its so faded (it was a Redken permanent red. Wish I had known more about the wonderful world of truesemis back then!), but it shows off the layers/cut
I kept cutting it shorter and shorter until I got this, BEFORE Victoria Bekham got hers cut. Then she got hers cut and then everybody and their sister, mother, grandmother + friend wanted it. I still love this cut I just hated having such a popular cut
So, I started growing it out which was a total pain
Then I used One n Only Colorfix and bleached it with 30 vol I believe and got this!
I put some Chi pink semi in, it looks red here because of the editing, but it was a gorgeous Barbie pink color.
Then I dyed the blonde a chocolate brown and put some Joico semi blue streaks in it but I dont have any pictures of that π I didnt like the in between color that the brown was so I went darker again
And then back to black again, and I chopped off all the damaged ends
I stayed with the black and started growing it out
And grew it out some more and added some black and red extensions. This was at my first salon job as a stylist!
Then I wanted to go lighter again but not by much, only to a mahogany color. So I tried using Scruples, it lifts unnatural color out and deposits the color you choose at the same time, its pretty cool. BUT, it totally made my hair feel like hell afterwards. The colors were nice though!
Then I used the next color up with Scruples to make my hair a bit lighter, which I liked the color a lot but I felt like I had to be really tan with it or else I looked sickly. Like, if I didnt wear makeup everyone would ask, "OMG are you feeling okay?!" Ya, so that didnt last long haha
I didn't want to try and lighten it further because my hair already felt like crap + I knew that even with a color remover I'd have uneven results because of the jumbo of crap base I had so I would need to bleach it and Id be stuck with an in between color again so I just went back to black
THEN, I wanted to try and put deep reddish highlights throughout it, but still wanted the black in it too. So I told my boss at the time to foil in thin pieces of 20 vol bleach then finish with 30 vol. WELL, the bitch used 50 vol on my fine hair and fried it. I didn't know it was 50 until I went crying into the back room because my hair was clumping off + felt like wet cotton candy mush, and I saw a bottle of 50 vol out next to the bleach. Here is what it looked like.
You cant see the damage so much here, but this is the colors it turned
So after much tlc I just dyed it back black. Theres no way I could have pssibly lightened it further and again, if I were to have dyed it it would have been an in between color which I hate on myself. You can see how horrid the ends look in these pictures:
Then I let a few years go by and I didnt do anything to it besides take care of it, dye it black with Matrix or Ion with 10 vol, and try to grow it out. Then over the course of 6-8 months I lightened my fringe because I was itching for a change
EDIT: Found some more photos!
This was in July 2013, right after I had my daughter, Violet. I let my roots get rediculously long so when I bleached them they were more on the yellow side, plus I had a faded Pravana rainbow still clinging on in areas (the yellow, orange and red were gone but left my hair really yellow looking). But, you can see how long my hair was here and how healthy it was:
I had to run a 10 vol bleach bath over it for 10 minutes to get the warmth out, then I used diluted Pravana Blue and Pravana Violet to make periwinkle. I used too much blue here + dont have a photo of the proper periwinkle unfortunately.
(yep, that's Violet <3)
and maybe a month and a half later, it faded to this:
And then I found this site! I wanted allover black/blue but it didnt work out, then I realized I wanted magenta. So after 2 color removers and 1 bleach bath and numerous fading treatments to rid my hair of the blue experiment, heres what I have now:
I ordered Directions Rose Red, and Special Effects Atomic Pink and Virgin Rose. They should be here early to mid next week + I'm SO excited. I've battled this black hair for so damn long, I love black hair on me but GOD its a freaking pain in the rear end to change it! My hair still feels pretty good for now, especially after giving myself a trim, so I'm going to bleach/bleach bath the ends once more and see how it goes. Either way, I'm slapping the dye on as soon as it gets here! I cant wait!
Love the pink, and do rather like the fire engine red too, seems to suit you! But I'm digging the blonde now as well. I think magenta will look great!
You seem to wear many different styles well, love them all, even when you were growing it back out.
Enjoyable pictures, and brilliant tattoo!
Damn, you are a hottie π
lol thanks ladies! and ya i loved the fire engine red but i dont have a picture of it, it was totally faded in that picture. it was just slices of it here and there but it was fun.
I really love the light blondes and the mahoganies on you!
I actually love your current look! And i think it would look absolutely awesome when covered with pink! Maybe slightly reverse-ombre-ish and totally intentional! Can't wait to see it!
aw, thanks!
Edit:
well, i did another couple bleach baths and it lightened the midlengths a couple shades and lifted the ends maybe one level. i think my hair is just stained, which im not suprised about but i wish there was a way to get rid of a stained cuticle π oh well, at least it lightened some. its not as light as i want it, id love for all of it to at least be a gold blonde, or as light as the top. il hust have to grow it out! heres my hair after the last bleach bath (3rd) and i really think thats as light as its going to get:
Nice colours π
Thank you π
UPDATE!
SOOO I did it! I finally have the hair I have been working towards! I used abour 3 oz Virgin Rose, 1.5 oz Atomic Pink, and 1 oz of Rose Red, with about 1 oz of conditioner
I am AMAZED by sfx! it barely bled when i rinsed it out. i mean, it did, but nothing crazy like when ive used other brands...i was expecting my tub to look like a Barbie chainsaw massacre. My tub only stained a little bit + its very very light. Also, it was a great consistency. I barely even got any on myself which is surprising! Its usually all over my neck, my arms, my face...not this time!
the ends look darker in the picture than they really are but i have been trying ALL day to get a couple pictures that show the true color (because it looks different in every room and in every light lol) and where my face looks decent. when i take pictures of myself my lazy eye totally just comes out of nowhere, its really hard to keep my eyes both focused on the same spot. so yeah, i took a ton of pictures and i am very happy with these. they are true to color (except the very ends) !
I am so inlove with this! It is the exact color that i wanted! Thank you everyone here for helping me through this process!
Moderator combined posts.
Beautiful vibrant color mix!
Is the deeper looking color on the ends from the base of the hair color from before? Pretty contrast.
Hurrah! Looks awesome!
Thank you!
And the ends arent actually that dark in real life, theyre a teeny bit more red and much lighter than in photos. Im going to try and get some good photos again today. Its cloudy so i should be able to.
yay, that looks lovely π
Lovely colour π
Thank you, everyone <3 i am so happy with it! I am very impressed with sfx. Being that i have always had trouble achieving unnatural colors, i was expecting it in the back of my mind to be a total fail. Nope! I guess the other brands id tried before for unnatural colors, like MP, redken, ion, and pravana is good over pale yellow but did not even remotely cover the base i had above on a test strand, they just dont work well on my hair. Its fine but i have a thicker cuticle so its hard to lift + for semis to really stick to/penetrate in a way. The only other brands that worked for me were chi (pink) and joico (blue). But sfx is wayyy better imo. The directions too seemed really good but i only used a little.
UPDATE:
i took a couple pictures today, this is with no flash or editing, it was cloudy out and this was next to the window. its so hard to capture how it really looks! like, here, it looks really red. in some lights, its like, hot pink! then in other lights it Barney purple
UPDATE:
So, I finally did it! That little section of hair has always drove me nuts, and the longer my hair gets, the worse that section gets. That part of my hair has always been really curly, it knots horribly, its a pain to brush out, and its always shorter than the rest of my hair because I just get too annoyed trying to get the knots out so the hair ends up ripping, leaving it shorter and really thin the farther down it goes. So, I took this whole undercut thing to use to my advantage, and just cut the problem off!
I actually really like it, I like the zig zag pattern it gives. I cut it really short, almost shaved completely so I would have an even length, and so I could actually see what I was dong back there. I have 2 cowlicks on each side on my nape hairline, the hair grows in spirals going outward to the sides, so it was pretty hard to cut it myself. It took forever to get the sectioning right, and took forever to get a nice, centered picture of it! Its pretty hard cutting back there my yourself. But, im really happy with how it turned out π its weird to feel coolness on my actual skin back there, it feels weird but i like it lol. I tried to cut as straight of lines as I could for the actual triangle, and cleaning up the bottom and sides.
Also, this is a perfect picture showing what my haircolor really looks like now. a cool hot pink on the top half and more of a red hot pink on the ends
oh, and once it grows in a bit, i may have to play with tapering it a bit because of my cowlicks, but i want to bleach that section and dye it electric banana!