The first time I dyed my hair pink was in 2006.
I then had pink hair on and off until 2013, at which point it became a permanent part of my look.
I am saying this to establish that I know how to use semi-permanent hair dye.
This information is going to be relevant in a moment.
A rant:
Let's talk about textiles for a second, since that's the subject of this blog.
How does dying a protein (hair, or silk) fiber work?
Well, the hair is covered with a lot of little sort of scales, called the cuticle. They're basically overlapping scales that cover the main part of the fiber. If you've got hair long enough, grab a strand and run it between your fingers, first from the top of the strand to the bottom, and then from the bottom to the top. Do you feel the difference? That's because the cuticle scales overlap and make one direction of the fiber "down" and one direction "up".
BTW if you ever find old wigcraft books that make a big deal about keeping the hair in the same alignment, but you're adapting their old techniques using natural hair to your own wigs using synthetic hair, you're allowed to ignore that info. Synthetic wig fiber, being monofilament plastic, doesn't have a cuticle. Go make yourself some double-thickness wig wefts by folding the fiber in half and know that you're totally going to be okay.
The cuticle is there to protect the hair fibers, and it does a really good job of that. That's a problem when you're dyeing something. If you've ever spilled red wine onto a wool sweater, you've spilled a heavily pigmented liquid onto a hair fiber. And yet, you can stop it from staining just by applying a room temp or cold liquid (ideally white vinegar) to the spill. Because there wasn't any real process to open up the cuticle, the cuticle was able to protect the center of the hair fiber from the pigment, and the pigment did not set in the hair fiber.
So, if we want to make white wool orange, and we want the pigment to last, we have to get the pigment into the hair fibers. We have to open up the cuticle to allow the pigment to penetrate. With fabric, a dye vat is pretty easy and effective. You get an agent to open up the cuticle (usually something like white vinegar) and then you open it up further with the application of heat. You then add time and pigment, and you get pigment in the wool.
This is tougher with humans because it's not advisable to boil your whole head for 90 minutes, but we'll get back to that.
We will also get back to why my bathroom looks like a scene from a CSI-themed indie film that spent their entire $3 special effects budget at spirit halloween.
You might ask why you use white vinegar to both remove the red wine and to stick the dye into the fiber. The answer is that damn cuticle again. When you're preventing the stain, you're opening the cuticle and then immediately flushing the area with a non-pigmented fluid. In this case, the vinegar is both the opener and the flusher. With the dye vat, you are opening the cuticle with the vinegar and then immediately flooding the area with a highly pigmented liquid. This is why arguments I see like "vinegar is used to set dye so putting it on yoru head will be good" drive me nuts. Context matters. If you ask me how long it's been since I last brushed my teeth and I say "seven, maybe eight" then my answer is useless, and yet still horrifying. Also, you know, dollars versus murders.
There's another component of dye, especially dyeing hair, and that's the carrier. Not all of the dye vat is pigment, and not all of the dye vat is going to be in the wool. Source: you have to dump out the used up dye vat when you're done and so that part definitely didn't stay in the wool. Something has to carry the pigment in the dye vat. Think of the pigment as a small dot and the carrier as another dot holding onto the first dot. The carrier is what allows you to have a vat of dye for wool or a paste of dye for hair and stick it where you want to dye it. But the carrier has another, very important job. It's important for the small dot of pigment that is being carried to want to be IN the fiber more than it wants to be attached to the carrier. If it's more attracted to the carrier than to the hair, when you wash the dyed fabric, the carrier will wash away and take the pigment with it.
And when I say "wash away", right now I mean "wash away, until it binds permanently to my 40-year-old shower floor." In this case, the pigment was more heavily attracted to 80's plastic than it was to the carrier.
See, you'll actually know when an effective carrier was being used, because the carrier liquid will stop being pigmented. A successful wool dye vat will lose its color when the product is dyed. Some brands of sem-perm hair dye--Iro Iro, Manic Panic, Arctic Fox, fuckin' Splat, Special Effects, box dye purchased by my mom in 2008 at Safeway because I didn't know how to drive but NEEDED to have pink hair for Sacanime, Punky, weird dye that was on clearance at Sally Beauty--when they've been sitting on your head for long enough, start to sort of sweat a clear liquid. When this has been attained, you know that you can wash out your hair with relatively minimal mess (for semi-perm dye standards) because the majority of what you will be washing will be carrier that has given up its pigment.
As previously mentioned, boiling your head for an extended time is generally not considered compatible with life. So, how is hair dye on your head different from vat dyeing fabric?
First of all, you have to take a different route to opening your cuticle. Generally, before you put semi-perm dye on your hair, you pre-lighten it with hair bleach. This gets your hair to be a white-ish blank space to put the color on, making it bright. It also serves the very important purpose of opening the cuticle up very effectively. When you bleach and then don't condition, your hair feels like toast. To phrase it differently, it feels rough, like when you rub your fingers up a hair backwards. The cuticle was opened by the bleaching process. (The cuticle has to open for the bleach to work because the bleach needs to get in there and take your natural hair pigment out). This is also why, when you put overtone on your virgin hair at the start of the pandemic, it almost all washed out immediately.
When your cuticle is wide open because holy shit hair does NOT like that, you have to put the pigment on. For convenience's sake, you don't want it to just be a liquid that will run off and get everywhere. You want a cream or a paste that will hold the dye there. For safety's sake, you need a cream that can be applied at a temperature safe to be on your head for an extended period.
Then, it sits on your hair, and the pigment moves from the carrier into your hair. In addition, a good semi-perm hair color will have conditioning agents, which will also go into your wide-open hair and rehydrate it, which will naturally close the cuticle. In a good world, your hair will have the pigment locked away, and the pigment in the carrier will largely be gone, so washing it out is only a little bit more annoying than regular washing your hair.
At least, that is, until my experience today with Strawberry Leopard hair dye.
I know what happened. More pigment than I am used to remained in the carrier, so when I went to wash it out, boy did i have to wash it out.
Clearly, a lot of the pigment ended up in my hair, which was good, but a lot of it definitely did NOT end up in my hair. It ended up in the rinse water. And by that, I mean it ended up in all the things the rinse water touched, since it was still an active dye at the time. I can live with pink shower grout. But holy hell was I scrubbing the shower floor with every melamine sponge and soft scrub cleanser that I could get my hand on and it just looks like an episode of the Forensic Files right before they spray luminol on things.
They say they're "conditioner based" which sounds to my non-professional eye as the problem. Conditioner goes into the hair, yeah? So you want the conditioner and the pigment to both go into the hair, yeah? So you just want the conditioner, which is now the carrier, to hang onto the pigment, so they both get in the hair, yeah? So you just need to rinse for FIFTY MINUTES of ACTIVELY RINSING MY HAIR and then MORE TIME actively SCRUBBING THE SHOWER to get it out, yeah?
Nah.
Anyway, they're a new product, and they're going right on the list of shit I'm never buying ever again. I don't care if this makes my hair as happy and hydrated as virgin hair. It was not worth turning my bathroom into the kind of set dressing you usually accomplish with a can of tomato paste and a $7 special effects budget that you spent entirely at Food Max.
For what it's worth, I also believe the color indicated on the bottle is not the color the dye is going to make my hair, which is really where it matters, IMO.
Bonus verse: how does permanent hair dye (bleach and color applied together) work? Well, when you bleach your hair, it goes through a series of shades. If you've ever sprayed bleach on a cotton or wool shirt, you'll know that it doesn't immediately get white. It goes from brown, to red, to light brown, to orange, to yellow, to blonde, then to inner lemon rind/white. What you have to do for permanent dye is to lighten the hair to the most adjacent color, and then tone the hair to the right shade. If you have dark brown hair and you want light brown hair with an ashy undertone, you can lighten it to orange and then stick a lot of purple toner on it, and the color wheel says that's ashy light brown so let's roll with that. Generally, because the toning pigments aren't as concentrated as bright clown colors are, they can be mixed in with the bleach and applied in one go. If you mix bright fun colors with bleach, the bleach acts on the pigments in the bright colors and makes them more natural looking hues, which is not the point.
Double bonus verse: so then how does laundry blue color the fabric, if it's applied very shortly and in cold water? Well, it doesn't. Think about when you add laundry blue to your clothes (or just trust me on this one because what I'm about to tell you is correct). You add it into the rinse water. Laundry blue does not harm your garments and can be applied in cold water and with no activating chemicals because it does not get into the fabric fibers. That's why it doesn't harm the garments, and why it has to be added after every wash. The way clothes are woven leaves a lot of space in the weave of the fabric, and the blue pigment just sits in the holes in the weave. It doesn't touch the fiber at all. This means it washes out (can be a little tricky if you overused it and stained something blue, but that's why we follow instructions on the label) and doesn't damage the fabric or the fibers. It basically doesn't do anything except hitch a ride in the space in the fabric, which it can do because it's added as the last thing and then the fabric is left to dry with the colored water in it. All hail the laundry blue.
Anyway, dye works for a reason and that reason isn't the reason people think and maybe just never trust new things ever and only ever use the things we know. *music from high school musical plays*
