Lesson learnt. Know what you want.

One thing I’ve learnt the hard way is to know what you want, when you go to the hairdressers. Recently I took it upon myself to change things up, and jump on the coloured hair band wagon. As I had recently cut my hair at Vidal Sasson Academy (for £5 I might add) and they did a brilliant job, I thought colouring my hair with them would be a great idea too. Vidal Sasson should be good at colouring hair right? Well, that is what I thought. NOTE when it comes to cutting and dying your hair at the academy there is always a risk, and you will be there for hours. However, these students ARE professionals taking further studies/ qualifications in their careers. Likewise, they are always under the watchful eyes of an instructor with years and years of experience.

With my skin test completed and no allergic reactions I was booked in and ready to get my hair done. I had done my homework, and prepared some images to show my hair dresser. Although I didn’t completely know what I wanted I did have a rough idea. I wanted it to be low maintenance, and nothing red or similar tones. With that said, I showed the instructor images of what I thought might look good, and here are some examples…

For me, cool tones suited me more and I believed warm colours would look weird and end up turning orange. Hence why I said I don’t want red. So what did the instructor suggest? Internal colouring using the colours blue and violet. Key to this is that my natural hair could cover the colour and naturally show waves of the blue and violet inspired by the marseille wave.

In theory this sounded great and during the process I did have some reservations of how little hair they bleached. They literally bleached only a panel on the right side of my head. Although small, I was like a small child and excited. I have never bleached my hair, nor have I ever seen myself blonde…

With the bleaching process complete, it was time to add the violet and blue. Once my hair was complete, a full 5 hours later it definitely was NOT what I was expecting. Below are snaps I took en route home, and in varying light. Not only did my hair look red, it definitely was not VIOLET. When the colour was shown to me, my first reaction was “It’s very pink!” and they had over estimated where my natural parting sat. The picture on the left shows my natural parting, and if I were to wear my hair like this all you would see is RED AND ORANGE!! Colours I definitely said I DID NOT want. However, as you can see in the right photo, I could cover it up slightly. However, the middle image does show another aspect of colour to the hair. Beneath the orange and red, sat pink and blue. My hair was now multi-coloured.

Why didn’t I say anything while I was there might you ask? Well, I was tired and just sat through 5 hours of getting one panel of my hair coloured. I was honestly fed up and just wanted to go home. Plus, I wanted to see the colour in natural daylight and perhaps I could come to love it the night after? Well, I didn’t because my hair looked like flag when tied up. Not only that, I could see at least 4 colours in my hair. If it had just been the blue, I would have been a happy bunny.

 

Can you tell how happy I am?

Find out what I did next… and ended up with far better hair. It involves a bottle of head and shoulders shampoo.