Hair Matters Blog

"Only Paolo can take THIS...and THIS...and give you...a Princess." ~The Princess Diaries

CEST POSIBLE!!!

Okay, so here’s the story. My Kid Sister loves changing her hair on the fly. One week she’s a brunette, the next a blonde, the next she’s black. I too love to change my hair color as the mood strikes. I’ve gone from brunette to highlights to blonde to blonde with pink to red to brunette again to black with racoon stripes back to brunette. There are, however, three MAJOR differences about our hair changing habbits:

1. I get my hair color in a salon…she does hers at home from boxes and bottles
2. I color my hair every three or four months at the most frequent…she colors her hair without waiting so much as a week in between sometimes
3.  I take better care of my hair, using quality products, leave-in keratin treatment, deep conditioning treatment and heat protecting spray…she has started using a better daily conditioner…but…that’s about it

So her hair is qutie damaged. The last time her and I spoke about her hair, I told her she needed to stop dying it and let it grow out so she could cut off the super nasty parts. But impatience and boredom reared it’s ugly head and about four days ago she dyed her hair black. That wouldn’t have been such an awful thing, if she hadn’t woken up yesterday morning and decided she didn’t actually want black hair and tried to bleach it out. Oh good lord.

So she comes to me for help and is, obviously, very upset. I didn’t imagine how bad her hair was actually going to look, and then I saw it. The hair near the scalp was so golden it was almost orange, then toward the ends of the hair the color faded away to a lighter, almost white blonde. In the middle of the hair it had a green tinge to it. The worst part was definitely the black spots. I’m not talkin dark…I’m talkin BLACK spots where she missed with bleach or it just didn’t take. There were a lot of them, and they were big. Her hair was in a bad way. So we consulted with the experts and determined that she had three options at this point, if she didn’t want to end up bald:

1. Use a non-bleach color remover to get rid of as  much bad color as possible. Then go back in and dye/color the hair with the blonde color she wanted. To maintain this hair color she would need to come back every four to six weeks to re-color the hair (mainly the roots) to maintain the blonde and not turn orange or green.
Estimated cost: $200 to $300

2. Color the hair with a darker color, like a brunette. This seemed like a good option to me because her natural color is a somewhere between dark blonde and brunette. This would allow her to hide the black spots and her hair to grow out so she could cut off the damage.
Estimated cost: $80 to $100

3.  Use a color-adding shampoo to try to balance out the color. This wouldn’t permanently change her hair color, and she would have to adjust it over time and she color changed and faded, but this would be the solution with the least amount of damage.
Estimated cost:  around $19.00 for an 8oz bottle

Cost was her biggest factor in determining which option she would pick to fix her hair. I thought her best option would be to try the color-adding shampoo and save her money until she could afford to do opton #1 and properly fix her hair. She agreed to give it a try and come back in a couple weeks when she could afford to really fix her hair.

We used a red shampoo on her hair because of the green tinge it seemed to have. I guess she had gone to Sally’s and asked them what she should to do fix her bad color and they sold her a Purple shampoo. Purple is made with BLUE and blue + yellow/blonde = GREEN. HELLO!?!? This is the second time someone I have known has gone into this type of establishment (not necessarily Sally’s…but one like it)  and has been sold a product that they had no business using! Do not go to these types of places for advice! Most salons sell the hair products they use and can and will give you much better advice. OY!

So anyway, the Red Shampoo worked WONDERS. It made her hair look 1,000 times better AND it didn’t add any more damage to her already fragile hair. Obviously, the top two pictures are the before and the bottom two are the after. I’ll blog later about the AMAZING flat iron spray I used on her hair, which not only smooths and adds shine, but also helps protect the hair from the heat.

I’ll post the pictures here in a couple weeks of her new color after she gets it done. For now I think here hair looks fine. No more green or orange, it’s a whole lot closer to being an even color and the way we parted it hides the black spots. Maybe she’ll start listening to me from now on…LOL

XOXO
The Hair Matters Girl