Okay, so let me tell y'all; bleaching henna is NO JOKE. I loved my red hair so much, but ended up being so time comsuming to catch up with my natural light blonde roots. Henna glosses made my hair feel better than it ever has, with a beautiful glowing red that changes in every light.
I still am a huge fan of henna and herbal ayurvedic hair treatments, however I think companies should be transparent as to which herbs are used in the mix.
Lush henna, for instance has shades containing indigo; which just so happens to turn into a swampy green the moment developer and bleach touches it and only gets swampier the more you bleach. If I am going to pay an arm and a leg for hair color, I expect to know exactly whats in it and how to remove said pigment.
Over the past two years I might have used 4 different formulas. Sometimes I would add a semi permanent red to seal in the color, sometimes I would switch brands of henna mixes. Light mountain had a really horrible mix (cinnamon spice) that they ended up pulling off the shelf, (I guess because it was that hideous, and full of INDIGO.)
Indigo is a plant based blue dye by itself and goes to a pretty saturated black color when mixed with henna; and its cool of you want black hairs that will fall off before you process a blonde.
So I had a mess...
Here is what I have done to my poor hair so far.
30 vol bleach to start off with for twenty minutes, that is when I realized that indigo and bleach DO NOT GET ALONG. It was a nice apricot color I should have left alone. No, I then went with 10 vol bleach for thirty five minutes and that is when the green and blue streaks developed, oh and about 6 inches of hair melted off. Then the whole section at the nape of my neck broke off to the scalp like a fucked up undercut. (I think it was because I had sections pulled up too tight during processing.)
So I figured a neutral toner would pull it together; it didn't, so I tried it again! No avail, I just had grey-green-shitbrown hair with questionable mauve streaks.. There is probably well over a pound of hair in the trash can by now because I ended up chopping off about four inches of shit flavored gummy bear hair.
I then put some color oops on it for thirty minutes and it rinsed out to an aqua green, platinum, and pink splotchy hot mess. More hair decided to jump off of my head. This didn't stop me though... I went to google for advice.
Google said that putting ketchup on the hair would neautralize the green; it also said that crushed asprin in a paste with water would tone the green out. So I crushed half of a bottle of asprin and remembered that there was a bottle of ketchup a little past the expiration date. I even added some of the conditioner with vitamin c added. (Vitamin c powder diluted will lift color as well.)
So I ended up with a bearable mix of all of the blonde shades.
The pictures are the timeline over the past week.
