Hair Adventures 1: A Paean To Green Hair

My hair was green for over 3 years, and now it's blue. I wish it was green again.

I tried to give myself pine green hair with a violet fringe and it went wrong... Well, it went fairly well until I washed it and now I have aqua blue hair with a royal blue fringe... I've had blue hair before, and I didn't mind it then, but this time around I just don't like it. I want my green hair back, and I've tried washing out the blue, but it just fades to lighter blue, and I'm scared to try stripping out in case I fry my hair. I'm just going to let it fade to a really light blue, then try and cover it over with a rather yellow green, and hope that the two together make the sort of mid-green that I love. In the meanwhile, I'm making this retrospective of pictures from when my hair was bright green and I loved it.

Here is my hair dyed with Directions Alpine Green - the colour my hair is currently meant to be! The last time I used it, it stayed very much like this, and I wonder what caused it to be so unstable this time - perhaps it's because I mixed in Crazy Colour Pine Green, perhaps its because I mixed in conditioner to try and repair my bleach-frazzled, hair... I don't really know. My last employers let me have green hair as long as it wasn't too vivid, so I dyed it this colour.

Spiky collar and short pine-green hair.  Selfies.

Below is another picture from early 2014, when my hair was short and green - although in this blueish lighted picture and with some fading, it looks a little more turquoise. This was around the start of me dyeing my hair green, and it's a colour I feel really suited me, hence why I have stuck with it for so long. 

Short dark emerald green hair, and a party outfit. Selfies.

As my hair started to grow longer, I started experimenting with more greens. For work I needed to keep it in darker greens and one colour, but for Hallowe'en 2014 I dyed it in this gradient effect. After the celebrations were over I dyed it all the darkest green of the very tips. 

Green ombre hair. Selfies.

Here is one from 2015, taken in my old apartment (I miss the pale purple walls in the hall-way). This particular shade of green ended up being "my colour" and I have gone back to it time and time again, even including it when I've had multicolour hair. I think this was summer time, hence the bright colour. I used to work at a school, so during summer I wasn't at work and could have my hair bright colours.

The start of the emerald green hair. Selfies. 

Even when I have dyed my hair in multicolour, 'mermaid' effects, I've always retained green as one of the main colours - on the top layer so it is the one that people can see most vividly. I don't mind having blues and purples in my hair - and I definitely liked it when all my hair was purple - but green has really become my favourite colour for my hair.

My first attempt at multicolour 'mermaid' style hair. Selfies.

This next one was from last summer. The weather was warm enough to warrant me wearing a white shirt instead of my usual all-black-everything, and my hair still had blue tips from when it was multi-colour. Blue is a fun accent colour, but I just don't really like my whole hair being blue. 

Summertime Gothic. Selfies.

Last autumn I pretty much settled into dyeing it the green that I want to stick with in the long run. I'd got into a routine with the Directions Apple Green, and it was looking very bright. I had fun doing matching makeup for it, including this angular look with iridescent green lip gloss over black lipstick. 

Bright green hair and matching makeup. Selfies

The photos below aren't selfies, they're a selection from the set that Raven took for me in January. The colour had faded out a little from washing, but was still quite bright. I wore a purple and black jacket with my green hair... as you can probably tell, my fondness for this colour pairing was building. 

Green hair in January. Photos by Raven. 

These pictures are from the same day - but are ones I took to focus on the make-up I did - green and purple like my outfit and hair. I rather liked this dramatic effect, and it is something I would like to repeat in future. 

Make-up for January photoshoot. Selfies.

This make-up made me feel like a fae-creature of some sort, and the green hair really does help with that kind of aesthetic. I filled my eyebrows in green and painted my lips to match. This is actually pretty recent - I think I did this make-up in March or April. There are a lot of good green make-up products available, so it's quite easy to find ways of co-ordinating green make-up for green hair. 

Green hair and green make-up.

I have had a lot of fun doing interesting make-up for my long green hair. I let it grow quite long - not as long as it was in my teens (I had it nearly waist-length once). The ends were getting a bit frazzled after repeated bleaching over the years, which means that I have since had it trimmed by about 5 or 6 inches. This purple make-up wasn't my neatest (the eyebrows came out a little uneven), but it was another pairing of purple and green. 

Green and purple once again in combination. Selfies.

This next make-up look was inspired by the idea of an 'evil dryad'. The great thing about unnatural green hair - not even leafy, or grassy green hair, but bright, vivid, artificial, green - is that it's good for looks that are based off distorted nature, because they're a nature colour, green, but not in a natural variation - well, unless it's in mineral form; malachite and emerald.  

Green hair and dark make-up. Selfies.

And this windswept picture (in which my new pointed fringe looks rather fluffy!) illustrates the colours my hair was meant to be - a violet fringe and an emerald-to-pine green for the rest of it... if only it had stayed these colours! Green and purple are my favourite colour combination, and this was the hair that my recently lace-on bat-wings were supposed to match.  

Green hair and purple fringe. Selfies.

I'm a little annoyed that the above colour combination was so shortly lived. I will try and somehow remedy the situation, but I am not sure how successful I will be. It really didn't work out as intended - even if the immediate results seemed successful. I think that perhaps at some point in the next two years, as it will be likely that I will need to have a more natural colour after I graduate in order to appease the professional job market, but now my green hair is (hopefully, only temporarily...) gone, I know that when that time comes, I will really miss it.

One thing I can say is that the pointy fringe turned out pretty well. It has faded blue, but it has a good shape. The picture above doesn't do it justice because I was literally holding it down against the wind. It was a rather bright but rather windy day when I took those, and you can see the trim on my sleeves! I have some more selfies of the new hair with the fringe better visible, but they're all decidedly blue!

The next instalment of my hair adventures is about my new hair... Don't get me wrong, it's not terrible hair, and my friend Melody who cut it did an excellent job, it's just that it's blue (which I dyed myself) and I just don't feel right with blue hair this time around, plus it is not what I had intended. However, I am trying to make the most of my blue hair.