Hair Adventures 3: Green Hair, Purple Fringe

I completely forgot about doing the conclusion to my hair adventures, so I'm sorry for not putting this up months ago!

As you may recall from ::Hair Adventures 2: Feeling Blue::, I previously dyed my hair pine green with a violet fringe, and while it was pretty freshly done, it rapidly faded to two-tone blue, which while it wasn't objectively bad, was just not what I actually wanted. The picture on the right shows the colours in my hair when it was done the first time around, and you can click the link above to see what happened when it turned blue.

As I mentioned in that previous blog, I had a plan to turn the blues back to greens and purple - put in very vibrant yellow green over the aqua blue, and neon pink over the royal blue fringe! I used Stargazer UV Green and Stargazer UV Pink over the faded blue hair, but before I did that, I made sure to fade it out as much as possible, to pastel turquoise-blue, and a bright blue for the fringe. To help it fade as quickly as possible, I used original formula dandruff shampoo, which strips temporary dye much quicker than ordinary shampoo, and does help as I can get dandruff in summer. 

My hair fixed with lime green and pink!

The bright lime green alone wasn't quite enough to get my hair a colour I wanted, so I put Directions Apple Green (a staple for my hair for ages, my favourite green dye) over it, to get it REALLY green! To keep it green, once every other week or so, I was mixing up some left over green dye (including some of the Crazy Colour Pine, and lots of the Stargazer UV Green) in with some conditioner and leaving it on my hair to deep condition it (it gets pretty fried with all the bleach and styling) and to make the hair more vibrant. I'm not sure this is the best method, but it was recommended to me by a friend, and it seems to be working for me - of course, 'your mileage may vary' as they say, and I am not a professional hair-dresser or stylist, so whether leaving conditioner on for the time it takes my hair-dye to usually set is a good idea or not is not something I am qualified to say. 

Slightly more Pine Green in the mix this time!

Putting more of the Crazy Colour Pine green results in a slightly darker green, but it also does fade bluer (I think it is more like a blue dye with yellow dye mixed in, rather than a green dye, and the yellow tones wash out faster). The Stargazer UV Green dye does fade pretty quickly, though, and when I'd run out of Pine and was just using UV Green to touch it up, it was fading to a more minty green. I was using Stargazer UV Pink, mixed with a little of the left over Violette to keep the fringe bright - and still am, as it doesn't take much dye and I still have some of that first bottle of Violette and a third of a bottle of UV pink!

Slightly faded out

If you have my Domesticated Goth account followed on Instagram - viewable in browser ::here:: - you will have already seen the 'Moon Child' makeup picture, and Birthday M.U.O.T.D (make up of the day) picture - I'm more active on Instagram than I am here, and I put content on Instagram that's more about my make-up, fashion, artwork and aesthetics, as I feel that Instagram is a better platform for primarily visual blogging. For wordy blogging, thoughts and even posts that are nearly articles/essays, then I will continue to blog here. I have been busy renovating my house over summer, so hopefully in the near future I will do a room-by-room account of my decorating ideas and inspiration, what still needs to be done, etc. However, I am back at college, so that might take a while!

This isn't actually the conclusion of my hair saga; there's going to be a Hair Adventures 4! On Friday night I stayed up most of the night dyeing my hair a more interesting way... why doing my hair took all night, and what I've done with it will be revealed in the next (and final) instalment of my hair adventures for this year (although those on my FB page will have had a sneak preview yesterday). I'm not changing my hair drastically again until at least next year - which I have a specific plan for, as I am aiming for a rather radically different change in about a year's time. 

Hair Adventures 2: Feeling Blue

As I mentioned at the end of my previous post, my new hair was meant to be a purple a pointed fringe, but the rest pine-green. The hair-cut, done by my friend Melody, turned out well (even if I am still learning to manage it), and initially it seemed that the dye - which I did myself - had worked out, too. I was really happy with my hair for a short while...

Violet fringe, pine-green hair... all seems well

I liked this colour combination - I had gone for a bluer, more violet purple and a green with cool tones so that together they would look better than a yellow-green and a pinkish purple, and I used a different dye for my hair than I normally did - the green was Directions Alpine Green with streaks of Crazy Colour Pine Green. I liked this, and I liked the Crazy Colour Violette. I didn't like how it washed out, though! After a couple of washes my hair was two-tone blue! 

My hair turned blue!

I don't actually know why this happened, either. Before I re-dyed my hair I had bleached my extensive roots, and had spent a while washing (not bleaching) the faded green from my hair until it was very pale mint. My fringe had been bleached to nearly white, and most of the top of my head bleached to pale blonde, so it wasn't from there being a lot of blue underneath. I did, however, dye it in two stages, as the first time was a bit patchy, and I did notice that after the second coat the colours seemed bluer. With the second coat I had also mixed conditioner in with the dye to try and deep condition my hair as I dyed it - something one of my friends recommended to me, and she has had no problem with it, but she uses Arctic Fox rather than Directions dyes.

Freshly done

I have had green dyes fade to bluish before - when I had my multicolour hair, which included actual blue, it definitely faded more towards the blue tones, and the greens became bluer. The picture on the left is how my multicolour hair started out - note that I used actual blues in the middle sections, and only green at the top  - and then it faded to mostly blue. 

After a few washes

However, this took a few washes, and didn't dramatically change colour the first time I washed it. It was also clearly a case of the green at the top fading to turquoise, still with hints of green, as well as blue from the middle section leaching into the purples. The blues remained pretty constant, and just faded a little - not dramatically.  

I don't actually know what has gone wrong with my hair, or how best to fix it. I don't want to bleach my hair again, as it's already brittle and a bit fried - and it needed quite a bit chopped off the bottom to deal with how much I had already damaged it. I'm trying to wash out as much of the blue as possible, and I've bought both some of my usual Directions Apple Green, and some Stargazer UV Green to re-coat the bulk section of my hair. I've also bought some Stargazer UV Pink to put over my royal blue fringe, hoping to make it look purple.

I don't know how well this is all going to turn out - the dye is ordered, but I have an exam on Tuesday, so I probably won't get any dyeing done until Wednesday - after which I will post a 'Hair Adventures 3' instalment to show you all how it turns out. 

Shiny blue lipstick.

I don't think the blue is an objectively bad colour - it's just not right for me. I don't even think I look necessarily bad with it - it suits me a lot better than my natural brown, and a lot better than that time I tried to have lilac hair, and I think it's better than the mint colour my green fades to, but it just doesn't seem right on me - I've had green hair, or at least mostly green hair, for so long that I just can't get used to my hair being a different colour. I look at my reflection and it just looks off - like I'm wearing a wig when I'm not. Plus I just like the colour green more than the colour blue. I think if it had been on purpose, that might also have given me a different outlook on it, but it being unwanted, some mistake I made in the process, really doesn't help. I've tried to make the most of it, and used it as an excuse to play around with blue make-up, but I definitely want it green again. 

Multicolour Hair... Again!

My hair is once again a mixture of cool-tone colours, but this time a slightly different selection. My friend Catastrophe Plague helped me with the dyeing.

Selfies taken on Raven's phone.

I started off with bleaching my regrowth and the under layers of my hair, which with my length of hair and how dark my natural hair colour is (dark cool-toned brown), means I have to bleach it in two sessions with several boxes of bleach. I left a lot of my hair jade-green, especially near the tips, as several years of bleaching my hair every few months mean it isn't as healthy as it could be (and the tips definitely need trimming as some are a bit fried) so I try not to over-bleach it if I can avoid it. If the gradient with the bleaching had been smoother, and if I felt that blonde suited me, I might have kept it with the green ombre effect, but alas I am so pale that blonde makes me look the wrong sort of ghostly.

That's not mould by the radiator, that's wallpaper remnants.

Catastrophe took the photo above, and Catastrophe was the one who dyed most of my hair. They separated my hair into horizontal layers, with a rat-tail comb and some hair-tyes, and then started sectioning the lower layer of hair, by the nape of my neck, into locks of about an inch of hair at a time, and tied each of those up with a hair-tie. Catastrophe then went systematically through my hair, dyeing each lock separately. Each lock of hair received its own blend of colours, with the lowest layer being mixtures of fuschia and purple, the next layer being violet and blue, the next layer being blue and turquoise and the top layer being turquoise and green. 

I left my make-up on... Oops.

I ended up sitting around a while with my hair in about 30 tiny pony-tails, all looped back on themselves, looking rather silly, and with dye all over my face, but it worked out really well in the end, and I think Catastrophe did an amazing job on my hair! This is my favourite multi-colour hair look so far, the colours are just the sorts that I love, and the 

Taken in the dimming light, but hopefully the colours show

Dyes Used

A variety of dyes got used, a few being left over from the last time I dyed my hair multiple colours. I have all the left over dyes stored in plastic clip-lid tubs for when I need to touch this up. The dyes used were:

Stargazer Magenta

Directions Violet

Directions Lagoon Blue

Stargazer Tropical Green

Directions Apple Green

Stargazer African Green
As you can probably tell from the results, the magenta was mostly mixed in with the violet, and the African green used quite sparingly this time. I really love the vibrant emerald green of the Directions Apple Green layered over both the very bleached and jade sections of my hair. 

For comparison, here are the previous times I have had multicolour hair:

This was the first time I dyed my hair multiple colours, even if it was just a variety of greens in a vertical gradient "ombre" effect. I only had this style temporarily as it wasn't work suitable, and I did it for Hallowe'en. I blogged about it ::here:: when I did it. I liked how it turned out, and was sad that I could not keep it in my hair. I think this was the first time I had a really luminous, vibrant lime green in my hair, too. I like the colour, but in retrospect I think that the cooler green tones suit me better than the warmer ones.

The next time I tried multicolour hair was last summer, when I did it for my friend's wedding - to match the colourful outfit I wore, which involved an emerald green dress and a violet jacket. I used quite a few more colours than I had before, and this was the first time I used blues and purples with green. I did my hair mostly on my own, with some assistance from Raven, and realised that hair this complicatedly coloured was really a two-person task. The purple did NOT stay in my hair well, and I used magenta over it for the first time to make it more vibrant. I blogged about that half-spectrum of colours ::here::.

This was the time after that... it had actually started fading in this set of selfies, but there was definitely more turquoise and blue than previous times. These pictures were tweaked slightly to counteract bad lighting, but give a pretty good example of what my hair was like. I did put purple in initially, but again, it washed out pretty rapidly. I have only had the latest dyes in one week, and I hope they last a bit better than before. I have learnt to use less shampoo with vibrant hair, as it is the shampoo that washes the colour out the fastest. Washing it without shampoo at all would just leave my hair greasy, so I have to use some, but I try to use it mostly near the scalp where my hair gets greasiest, and to not use too much. 

Loving My Green Hair

When I started dyeing my hair green, it was partly because my blue hair had faded to a greenish turquoise and I had as yet not experimented with green yet, partly because I really like the colour green, and . Green is my second favourite colour, but it is not one that appears much in my wardobe, unlike plum purple (my favourite colour) and wine red (my third favourite colour) so having green hair has mean that for some outfits, I have been wearing wigs more than I used to do. I was never expecting to keep my hair green for this long - I thought that by now, my hair would be back to blue or even violet again - but I've really fallen for the green! 

Bright green hair. Selfies taken with forward facing phone cam

This picture was taken just before I went on holiday over Easter. As I've said before, I reserve the brighter shades for the holidays because even though work are happy with unnatural colours, they prefer it if I stick to darker shades - easier said than done when my hair often fades to a muted pastel version of whatever colour I had it dyed before I have the opportunity to retouch it and recoat it in another layer or two of colour. While the forward-facing camera on my new-ish phone does not have adjustable focus, and due to this several of the pictures are slightly blurry, I still love this collection of selfies because my hair looks so luminescent and vibrantly green; as I use UV reactive dye, my hair really does glow in the twilght of evening!

I have had my hair green for about a year now, so a lot longer than I had it purple or blue. I am starting to think about going back to either blue or purple, but I think I will keep it green for a little while longer. 

Gradient Green Hair

This time, on updating my green dye (it fades after a month or two, and the roots start to really show), I decided to do something different. 

I usually use a combination of Stargazer UV Green or African Green for the highlights and Stargazer UV Turquoise or Tropical Green for the lowlights, and thus get green hair with some dimension to it. This time, I decided to do something a lot more dramatic and give myself gradient hair. I've heard gradient hair called "ombre" but I'm pretty sure that only applies to where you've bleached the lower half of your hair and then maybe applied colour over that - a bit like how my hair dye goes after really growing it out! 

This was done by bleaching out my roots first. I hate trying to bleach my roots as they never quite bleach as pale as the neighbouring pre-bleached hair because it's almost impossible to not get bleach on the neighbouring sections, so the already-bleached hair becomes double-bleached, and the roots only once bleached, and then it still doesn't quite match... argh. I am generally not the best at bleaching my own hair. I have to bleach all my hair twice to get it from nearly black to blonde, too, so the second time I have to try and be extra-careful not to re-bleach what was bleached the previous time, because otherwise my hair will get all brittle at that point and is liable to snap, and while I quite like my hair short, an inch and a half long is shorter than I'm prepared to have right now. Sometimes this means I get a narrow stripe of slightly darker hair where I've strayed too far from the previously bleached hair and only double-bleached parts of my roots. If anyone knows how to make this an easier and less frustrating process, I'd LOVE the advice! 

(As long as the advice isn't "go to a hairdresser's salon" because I can't, due to aerosol allergies and cost issues.)

Once all my hair was as blonde as it was going to get, and I'd done my very best to not frazzle it, I started applying the dye. I love Stargazer because it's very cheap and very vibrant and stays quite vibrant for a while, and I used the UV Green for the top section. One of my friends suggested mixing conditioner in with my hair-dye to get softer hair and to help it after bleaching, so I did that, and combed a mixture of UV Green dye and conditioner down about four inches from my roots. The next section was a mixture of UV Green and UV Turquoise and conditioner, down another couple inches, and then UV Turquoise and conditioner for the rest down to the tips. Once I had washed out all the stargazer dye and conditioner, and dried my hair, I put another coat of UV Green over my roots for an extra vibrant neon green, and then got some Renbow Crazy Colour in Pine Green and rubbed it on the very tips of my hair. 

Of course, I can't have this for work, really. As I have had two weeks off from work on holiday, and this week coming is the Halloween week, and work are being quite permissive in the run up to Halloween (I work at a school, so they really get into the Halloween spirit for the children), it can stay until the weekend. After that, I am using up the remaining Pine Green and having dark green hair, but for now, I get to enjoy my fabulously bright gradient hair. At sunset, it literally glows in the UV twilight. 

Green Hair

My hair is green, one of my favourite colours, second after purple. 

It's even brighter in real life.

In fact, it has been since just before the Easter break. It started off quite bright green and has since been toned down to a darker green for work. Right now it is bright green again, but I am part way through the dyeing process and it will be getting a coat of UV turquoise dye (Stargazer) which will mute and cool the colours somewhat. 

It takes bleaching it twice and layering the colours to get them how I like. My fringe has blue tips that I can't bleach out from when I had violet hair, which gives my hair sort of a gradient to blue in places. The colours I usually use are Pine Green by Renbow Crazy Colours, Apple Green by Directions and usually Tropical Green by Stargazer but this time I am using the UV dye because I am going clubbing on Friday and I want hair that will be a bit special under the UV lights (black-lights). 

Terrible lighting and bad flash - webcam photo.
Even with the harsh flash, it should be clear that it's a lot darker.

I have an older photo of my hair the last time it was darker green, to show what it is supposed to be like. It has since been cut again so that it is a bit more practical as it was growing out to be long enough to get in my eyes and be a bother. 

Short Hair

In early to mid December, I had my hair cut the shortest it has ever been. At the front there is enough length to frame my face, but at the back there's less than 2 inches of the stuff (and that's now, with about a month's re-growth) and dyed it my favourite colour - a bluish violet.

This is quite a drastic change, considering I had long hair down to my bust before (not the longest it has been - it was once down to my waist) and that the previous shortest hair-cut was ::this one::. There are many reasons for the drastic cut. On a practical level,  there were several good reasons. I work with small children (mostly 4-6yr olds), and some of them are inclined to tug my hair to get my attention, or end up flicking or splattering stuff into it when doing messy activities, and so it seemed more practical to have short hair. I also wear wigs quite often, and it is easier to tuck shorter hair under a wig than longer hair. Long hair takes longer to dry, uses more dye and is harder to keep tidy and look after, etc. 

Another reason was because I felt the shorter hair-style would make me look and feel a bit more mature. I've had long hair since I was a little girl, with a few attempts to stick to a shorter style, but generally, it has been long, and I felt that this was a look that would move drastically away from that and have me looking more sophisticated. I've moved on a long way in life in the last few years, both in distance and in knowing what I want to do in life. Now, I feel like I have regained direction as well as made progress. 

I've had so many conflicting ideas of what to do as a career, all I have known is that going back to studying is something I have to do, and it has been hard picking which of my varied interests and passions coincide best with my skills and would be best developed into something I could see myself working in for a long time. As a teen, I was dead set on architecture, but for varying reasons ended up thinking I would be happier as an artist/illustrator, and that's what I worked towards at college - in the end, though, I tried that and found that working in art killed my passion for what I was doing, and I wasn't enjoying it. For a while I thought about teaching, but I don't think I have the right attributes for that. Now, I feel like I was right to begin with. Sometimes you have to try something to know it isn't actually what you're meant to do. 

Cutting hair short seems to often be a rite of passage for other people, a symbol of cutting away parts of their old self with their hair. It has been the same for me. 

I Have Purple Hair Again!

I had a long chat with some of the management team at work, and I was allowed to dye my hair purple, as long as it wasn't too vivid. So,  I went off and did that! I have been holding out because I didn't want to do anything that would be considered very unprofessional-looking, or go against dress code. I understand the need to look sensible and responsible for the parents at the school, but as vivid colours have become more fashionable and mainstream, and as several of the mothers have interesting colour hair (one has bright blue!), I think I am now in a better place to have purple hair, especially darker purple, as it is a lot more acceptable than it was a few years back. 

My eczema did not agree with my lipstick.
The skin around my lips is pink. I don't have giant lips. 

I get a rather itchy reaction to all dyes involving PPD, whether black, purple, blue or otherwise. As such, I've had to go away from permanent dyes and search for other ways to get my hair interesting colours. I've gone for semi-permanent dyes, which are more expensive as they require more maintenance and touch-ups, but which allow me to have a variety of colours without a sore and itchy head. I've tried henna and indigo, but would take so many applications just to get my hair black, that it wouldn't be financially viable. 

The first step in dyeing my hair was bleaching it. As I have previously experimented with henna, this didn't quite go to plan. As my hair was all back to the same dark brown, I had assumed that all the henna had washed out. Unfortunately, I was wrong, and it is just that the henna'd hair was about the same colour as my natural hair, and therefore I couldn't see it. The results from the first bleach treatment was hair that was blonde at the top, and copper from a few inches down to the tips. 

Not a pretty sight, but a work in progress.

This was not what was anticipated! I did this on Wednesday morning before an afternoon shift, and had to wear a wig to work! Oops. I then went back into town to buy more bleach to bleach the copper parts a second time. Even after a second bleaching, they went to a pale ginger (I don't have a picture) whereas the very top roots went blonde. Initially I panicked, but after advice from my friend Eilidh, I figured that my hair dyeing would probably result graduated plum effect, and that was something I could work with. 

After adding some Stargazer Plume, itself a blueish purple, I ended up with a good plummy colour that I was reasonably happy with, but it was a bit too red for my liking, almost a dark pink rather than a purple. As you can see, my natural hair is reasonably long. Anyway, in this photo the graduated effect is not very visible, but it is in real life. 

Purple!

I then bought some Stargazer True Blue to give a darker (and thus less vivid, as I felt that the plum was perhaps too bright on its own for work) and more obviously varied effect. I sectioned off the most vivid sections of my hair with hair-tyes and clipped them above the crown of my head (which, as it had previously been blonde, was a very vivid purple) and then set about adding blue to the browner and redder sections in order to make a deeper, more purple colour. The effect makes it look like I have plum highlights, purple as a main colour, and deep, almost indigo, lowlights. I'm really happy with it. 

Several purples - and frizzy hair! Oops. 

I am hoping that this photo demonstrates the variety of purples in my hair a bit better. My hair is a bit dry and frizzy from repeated bleaching and dyeing. I am delaying washing it so that some of the natural oils can return and bring it back to life a bit, and the next time I wash it, I will minimise shampoo and condition it thoroughly. Altogether, I am very happy with my hair, and will wear it out to dinner with friends on Friday with pride! 

All photos are webcam selfies taken on my MacBook. Please ask if you wish to repost anywhere, and if you do, please credit Domesticated Goth and link back here.