How I Went From Dark Hair, To Bright Hair
Since dying my hair red it’s been one of the things I’m asked about frequently. About how I managed to get it so red, what hair dye do I use, what products do I use to keep it red. I get asked about it so much, through the blog, and in real life, that I’m surprised I’ve not blogged about my hair story before!
So lets start off in March 2011.
I’d been dying my hair dark brown, but as you can see from this photo it looks almost black. At the time my hair really didn’t seem that dark! This is when I started thinking about dying my hair red, but I knew my hair was far too dark for it to turn red, so I started washing my hair with Head & Shoulders shampoo as I’d heard it naturally strips your hair.
April 2011.
After about a month of not dying my hair and using Head & Shoulders I started to notice my hair was becoming lighter. It was still quite dark so I decided to carry on with the Head & Shoulders for another month. This was before I’d heard of Colour b4, or it had just come out and I didn’t know much about it, but I wish I had used this back then as it would of made the process a lot easier!
May 2011.
This is when I got bored of waiting for the colour to come out of my hair and decided to start dying it red. As you can see from the photo it did basically nothing to my hair but give it a slight redish tinge towards my roots, and the ends of my hair remained dark. I decided I didn’t want to give up and kept washing it with Head & Shoulders.
Again in May 2011.
2 weeks after the first time I dyed it red I decided to give it another go. The second time I dyed it, it came out a lot redder but still quite dark. But at least here you could sort of tell it was red!
June 2011.
This must of been taken about the 3rd time I tried to dye my hair red. It was still rather dark, and although I kept washing my hair with Head & Shoulders, the dark tones in my hair just weren’t getting any lighter. So this is when I decided to use Live XXL Max blonde on top of my hair. I’d watched YouTube videos and heard that this hair dye contains a small amount of bleach in. I was afraid of bleaching my hair, and I also didn’t want to go too bright so I thought this would be a good solution. I used it to help brighten up my dark areas, which turned my hair a lovely orangey red colour (ewww). After this I dyed it again with my usual red colour resulting in a nicer brighter red colour.
September 2011.
Excuse the really bad drunk photo, and apparently I have no photos of myself in August! This was when I first went back to uni and the reddest my hair has been. This was after the attempting to bleach my hair with Live XXL Max blonde. As you can see after I then dyed it red again the colour really took resulting in quite nice bright hair!
November 2011.
My hair then didn’t stay as bright for long, even though I was regularly dying my hair. Not wanting to try and bleach it or anything I decided to start regularly dying it with Live Colour XXL Red Passion which kept my hair quite a nice bright red. By using that and lots of colour protect products my hair was staying red.
February 2012.
By looking after my colour with products and dying my hair every 4 or so weeks I managed to maintain my bright red hair. Looking back at the photos I’m quite impressed at the transformation my hair had made! And without having to do anything drastic like bleach my poor hair. If you read my latest blog post about my hair here, you’ll know its not as bright anymore, but more of a darker plummy red. I find myself getting bored of my hair, but after the effort its taken to get it to red, I don’t want to give up on it just yet!