glenn5 swung by yesterday for dinner (home baked veggie pot pie and beer bread) and a movie (Gentleman Prefer Blondes) and I realized beforehand that 1. I needed to visit the Kaiser-Permanente leeches to get my bi-monthly blood test and 2. We were out of both fresh mushrooms and tofu. Errands in the morning, yo.
At the grocery store (sporting a lovely new bruise on the inside of my elbow–I didn’t get the nice technician whom I adore, but a rather brusque guy who was fine with the needle entry, but too cavalier with the exit. Ouch.), I saw a hair coloring kit for do-it-yourself highlights. I’ve wanted to try highlights for a while now–something burgundy or a dark copper–but didn’t want to spend what it would cost at a salon to have it done professionally since I didn’t know whether I’d like it enough to make it worth the money. The virtue of hair coloring, if I hate it, I can always go back to black. But it seemed excessive to spend $60-100 on a professional job to decide I hate it, and then go home and color over it. This do-it-yourself concept seemed like a good trial run.
This morning, I don the plastic gloves, shake up the solution (which includes a powder that turns the mixture bright, bright pink so you can see where you’re applying it), and fiddle about with the comb-tool thingy supplied.
Lessons learned:
1a. If your hair is longer than shoulder length, you will get colorant on your shoulders and back.
1b. For long hair, highlights should be applied by a color buddy. Doing it yourself, especially for the back of the head, is awkward and a good way to get bright pink goo on your arms.
2. Previously colored hair doesn’t take highlights as well as new growth.
3. I suck at using the comb-tool thingy.
4. There’s more peroxide in the solution than they’d like you to think, and when applied to hair in an intense glop/strip for a half an hour, is a recipe for damage.
End result: my hair isn’t quite dry yet, so I’m not sure what the final outcome will be like. But from the damp scrutiny I gave it in the mirror, I’m not impressed. The streak I did at my temple seems to have really fried that hair and it’s gone frizzy, even damp. For the majority of the length of my hair, the color didn’t take, while it worked quite well at the roots. Light roots, black hair. Not exactly the look I was going for.
I’m going to apply some silicone treatment to minimize the appearance of the damage after it’s dry, and perhaps change my part around a bit to see if that will conceal better the overabundant lightness at the roots. But otherwise, my general inclination is to give it a week so I don’t stress out my hair with two coloring attempts in less than a few days, and then dye everything back to a nice, solid black.
Unfortunately, this weekend is the Georgia Big Picture Conference, which means that I can either go out in public like this, or re-color sooner than I’d like to.
Maybe this weekend would be a good one to explore some hat fashions.
Writing Stuff
9-day So-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-fish reject from Ideomancer.
. For folks who want to partake of the nomination process, you can do so 
