Hair Color Adventures part 2 - Blonde

I decided it was time to do another hair color blog.  This time I went from blonde to blond(er).  Although I was already blonde to begin with for this blog, this is the same technique I used to go blonde when my hair was a medium reddish brown.
Here's what my hair looked like before hand...

Although it was already blonde, my roots were growing out pretty bad as you can see in picture 2, and my hair was just feeling...dull.   I went down to Marie's Beauty Supply and decided to pick up some hair products.  I picked up (from left to right):

L'oreal Super Blonde (my favorite lightener), Matrix So Silver Shampoo (for maintenance), Wella color charm developer no. 20, and Wella White Lady T18 toner.

Yeah, that is a giant bottle of Wella Color Charm Developer.  Hopefully it will last until I need to use it again because I only used a small amount for this hair adventure.

I started with bleaching out my roots(only my roots! My hair was so blonde already I didn't want to fry it!).  This part is easy, I've done it so many times I could practically do it in my sleep.  In fact, I did this part while cooking fried chicken and watching Supernatural.  

Note: I don't recommend bleaching hair while frying chicken.

Here's what my hair looked like right after I washed the L'oreal super blonde out:

Don't forget to rest a towel over your clothes when bleaching so you don't ruin anything.  I've made that mistake before.

Yuck! What too yellow!!  I wasn't worried though, I still needed to do the toner.  The Wella toner needs dry hair to work with, I'm not sure if dry hair is actually required, but I find it works a lot better than wet hair. While I waited for my hair to dry, I mixed the entire small bottle of Wella White Lady toner and 2x the amount of developer. (1 part toner, 2 parts developer).  It took a good 30-40 minutes to develop.  I waited until it was a nice, thick, rich purple color before putting it in. The first time I did this on my hair I mixed the developer then put it right in my hair.  Um, dumb me.  It didn't work out too well.  

I applied almost all of that developer ALL OVER my hair, getting it everywhere I could.  I see now that I missed a few spots, oops, better luck next time right?  So I put it in my hair, wrapped a plastic bag around my head to not get anything too messy, and waited for about 15 minutes. 

Here's what it looked like when it washed out and I dried it:

 Yay!!  I hardly see any yellow in my hair now, most of what I see is on the tips.   So there's my hair adventure for this year.  I like the way it turned out!  Here's a few comparison pictures:

Before

After

No more roots!

 

Hair Color Adventures

So, recently I decided I wanted to dye my hair. I didn't just want to dye it a slight different shade, I wanted something drastic. I had tried other L'Oreal Feria colors. I think I went with a dark ash blonde, then when that shade didn't take and washed out in 2 weeks, I went with a medium brown:

So this is the most similar to what my hair looked like before. It looks pretty natural on me, but I was wanting a more drastic color change. I picked L'Oreal Couleur Experte 3.5. This color says on the box "Best to use on dark brown to black hair". As you can see, my hair is neither, but I thought, well why not. The color on the box looked really pretty, so I thought I'd try it anyway. Here it is, the one I picked. And here is how my hair turned out. I left the color in for 35 minutes, because my hair is SO stubborn when it comes to color.

I think it turned out pretty good! In the sun, it does look similar to what is on the box. We didn't keep the highlightener in for very long, because we didn't want it to look unnatural. However, this made them impossible to see in anything but natural light. I'll probably redye my hair this way in a couple months to keep the color, and also use more lightener to make the highlights more visible. I really like it! It's the darkest my hair has been. Also, my hair is EXTREMELY soft right now. It's been in for a day, and I left the conditioner (the one that came in the pack) in my hair for almost two hours while I did some chores around the house. Then I rinsed that out, put conditioner in again and sat in the steam for 5 minutes. I'm not sure my hair has ever been this soft. I hear L'Oreal has a side effect of drying hair out horribly after a week or so, so I will probably continue to deep condition my hair.