About Bleach...
Okay.. so let’s get started and dig into bleaching; what condition your hair is in, what is best for it, the different types of bleach, etc.
Back in January I had my hair as a really vibrant blue, but as I can’t seem to keep my hair the same color for more than a couple months, I decided to hike my ass up to target and buy a box of black hair dye. This was a big mistake. Of course, if you want to go black by all means go for it, but getting back to a nice base color is not an easy venture after taking in a permanent black.Â
In my mind, I would’ve been able to bleach my hair once or twice and gotten back to my vibrant blue you see above. But expectations vs. reality here... This definitely did not happen. My hair turned light blonde, and brassy, and green, and still held most of the black. This was a nightmare to me, as my hair had never turned green like this before. I had left the bleach on for 45 minutes after application, so around an hour in total. I rinsed my hair and was mortified.
After doing some research I found a lot of people talking about purple shampoo calming brassy and potentially green tones as well. But the thought of purple shampoo wasn’t enough for me, so as well as the shampoo I made the fatal mistake of picking up more bleach.
I have my hair pinned up, but this was the result after the second bleaching. As you can see, I pretty much got rid of the green. but the brassy colors were still in there. At this time I had no idea toner helped, and being clueless I used arctic fox’s frose to color my hair. Now, pink colors barely show up unless your base color is very light. so instead of getting pink I got a muddled pink roots orange-y hair weird mess; again.Â
I was pretty annoyed and ready to give up, at this point my hair felt very damaged and the last thing I wanted to do was get more bleach. But I'm very determined to get things done exactly how I imagined... so I caved and bought more bleach.
Ta-da it actually worked this time!! I picked up a Kiss brand box bleach that came with a toner, but it wasn’t a permanent toner so I didn’t touch it. Instead, I was convinced my hair was light enough to do a silver and again I was wrong. I found a youtube video where this lovely girl concocted her own mixture of silver dye using Arctic Fox’s Transylvania, Manic Panic’s purple haze, and diluted the mix with conditioner.
The results after this one was okay to me, though you can see at the ends my brassy blonde was still showing through. I kept this in for about a week before heading to Sally Beauty’s, deciding to fix this mess once and for all. After some more digging around I picked up the Wella T18 toner with a big bottle of the 20 Wella Developer. Now at this point my hair was pretty faded, but I wanted to make sure the toner would take to my hair, so I did as the lady at Sally’s suggested; a bleach wash.
For those of you that don’t know a bleach wash is a very mild form of bleaching your hair. For this process I used half a packet of Wella bleach powder along with 1.5 oz. of the 20 developer, and diluted the mixture with shampoo until I had enough to cover my whole head. I let this sit for about 30 minutes, after washing, my hair was completely stripped of purple, but instead of returning me back to my base color... I had blue-ish tints near the top of my head.
After this I absolutely refused to use bleach again, but still wasn’t convinced the toner would take to my hair, so I did a little trick that I found recommended by several beauty YouTubers...
1 cup of baking soda
1 cup of 10 or 20 developer
3 tablespoons of dish soap
3 tablespoons of purple shampoo
I know what you might be thinking, but this trick has saved me. I mixed that all together, having well more than I needed for my hair, got on my gloves and massaged it into my roots, as that was the only spot on my hair that needed more lightening. I was a little nervous for the results as my hair was so damaged, but I wanted this to be the last time I messed with my hair for a while so I could let the poor thing heal. After letting the mixture sit on my head for 25 minutes, I took my cap off to see that my baby roots had turned pink.
Now at this point, I was annoyed, and had no idea how that had happened. I sighed with frustration, but I still had one last hope: my Wella T18 toner. And damn do I gotta say...
It really did the trick. This toner was amazing, it gave me the light blonde I had been set off to get at the start of this whole charade. Now as you can see there were some brassy spots I missed (though most of that is from lighting) but I just had to stop then and let my hair breathe.
These were the several mistakes in my hair process that made me learn a ton, and I hope I can help some of you avoid such a frustrating process.
--Danae N.