Anyone who has known me for any length of time knows that I’m no stranger to changing my hair, and often do it to alleviate boredom. This year I’ve had very long hair that fell halfway down my back, a shorter collarbone-length style, and currently have it in lots of choppy layers. The color has been brown, brown with blonde highlights, entirely blonde…and now that fall is here, I’ve decided it’s time to go back to my, er, roots and dye it red again.
I know that every hairdresser on the planet is cringing when I say that I’m an old friend of box dyes. Yes, yes, you’re not supposed to color your own hair, you’re supposed to go in and have your stylist do it….yada yada yada, blah blah blah. I KNOW. So really there is no one but me to blame for what happened on Saturday morning.
I got up early, watched some tv while munching breakfast, then headed into the bathroom to begin my transformation. I’d chosen a box of copper red, because I wanted a more dramatic change than just blonde to strawberry blonde. I pulled on the little plastic gloves, mixed up the dye, and went to work. I finished up, set the timer, and went off to fold a load of laundry until it was time to rinse my hair.
Fast-forward to me, post-shower, staring at my still-wet strands of hair. I could already tell this wasn’t going to be good. I’ve never actually had a botched dye job before, so I tried to take deep breaths and tell myself it’d be okay once I dried my hair. Determined to prove my nervousness silly, I whipped out the blow dryer and meticulously dried my hair.
Yup, it was orange. Bright, circus clown orange.
YIKES.
I debated what to do. I called my friend Maggie, who colors her hair just as frequently as I do, and asked her advice. She recommended coloring my hair again, this time using a medium brown, but warned me to lay off until tomorrow if I could.
Well, I couldn’t, so I booked my orange-headed ass to Fred Meyer for more hair dye.
Approximately forty minutes later, my hair was colored, rinsed, and dried again. To my relief, it looked normal. A lot darker than I’d originally planned, but it was at least a color found in nature. Now that the shock’s worn off, I actually really like the new color.
I’ll probably wait a couple months before coloring again, to give my hair a chance to recover a bit from the recent assault of dyes. And next time, I may just fork over the cash to bring in a professional to get the job done right.