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. 

Half A Spectrum In My Hair

My hair is currently a bit more faded than this. The purple, which ended up being neon pink over blue as the purple dye washed out with the first wash, washed out even after being pinked, and is now a royal blue. The hair at the top ended up less neon green, and more citrus yellow. I used several different dyes, mostly Stargazer, but also a Directions dye. For the greens I used Stargazer African Green and then Stargazer UV Green for another coat over that once the African Green faded. For the turquoise I used Stargazer Tropical Green and then Stargazer UV Turquoise over it.  For the blue I used Directions Lagoon Blue and Stargazer Royal Blue. The purple at the base started off as Stargazer Plume, but was then colored over with Stargazer Magenta because it faded to blue. I had to bleach my hair twice to get it pale enough, and to get enough of the existing turquoise/verdigris dye out. The UV Green washes out really quickly, and the African Green is more permanent. I find it really hard to get any purples to stay in my hair. 

Multiclour Hair. Selfies by HouseCat

This is a very, VERY, high-maintenance thing to have done to my hair. Because of how vividly bright and light the top is, my nearly-black regrowth shows very rapidly, and the colours all wash out and muddy together. I will have to re-do all the roots at some point, and touch up all the colours, but will need to get someone to help me separate my hair where I separated the first time around, so that the colours are all over wherever I had the same colour the last time. The purple just will not stay purple! Whenever it has been freshly touched up, and when I did it originally, the colours were stunning, but it is rather hard to keep it like that. I have also bleached my hair too many times, and will need to get all the hair at the ends trimmed out where it is fried.

It was also incredibly time consuming to do. It took two goes with bleach at its longest allowable leave-in time to get my hair pale. It then took a while per colour, with each colour separated with lots of clingfilm during the curing time, and then I had to wash it all out, and then touch it all up the next day during proper daylight because I'd missed bits trying to colour it in the poor artificial light of the bathroom. I think it was approximately a day's work, just to have multicolour hair.

I did it for my friend's wedding, and I am very happy with how it looked that day. I then re-did it for the start of university, and I think knowing my hair was looking awesome really boosted my confidence on my first day. As such, it was worth it.

Will I do it again?

Maybe, maybe not. It is a LOT of work! I may just try and maintain what I have until it gets unsustainable, and then start again with a more simple variation, with fewer colours, less of a gradient. I am also thinking of having my fringe reinstated, so that will probably alter what I want to do with my hair. But for now, I will enjoy the fruits of my labours. I did gradient hair with three shades of green once before, ranging from lime green through to emerald green. That was a bit less time consuming; maybe next time I will only pick three colours.

Pictures are selfies, and I tweaked the contrast and such a wee bit (mostly to make them all consistent), then made a collage of them, in ::PicMonkey::, which is free to use, although you have to subscribe to the paid-for Royale version for stuff like better bat clip-art.