“Ah Thought Ah Was Gonna DYE!” Eve’s Adventures as Carrot Top

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Well, as you can guess, It Did Not Go As Planned. I was hoping for a nice auburn . . . What I ended up with was more along the Wilma Flintstone line. “Hmmm, your hair really does pick up dye quickly,” my stylist said, giving me some inkling of the horror to come. After three hours of lightening, then dying, then highlighting, then cutting, and drying, it was . . . Well, orange. Light, bright orange. “It looks very glamorous,” says the stylist. Well, yes, I guess, if you’re attracted to rodeo clowns. I decided to give it a night–I had no choice, as the salon was closing up for Good Friday, so everyone could go right to church and pray never to have hair like mine.

I kept thinking Cynthia Nixon. Rita Hayworth. Susan Hayward. Then I’d get the overwhelming urge to lunge at people and tell them to *Dial down the center! It’s good for you and cheap for them!! * Couldn’t sleep at all last night, as my hair lit up the room like an Eat At Joe’s sign.

This morning I went to the Shop Rite the second the doors opened and made a beeline for the hair aisle. Grabbed some Ash Blonde and some Dark Blonde (the web sites I desperately cruised at 6:00 this morning said “get color lighter than what you want the end results to be”). Snipped off some hair and did strand tests with both colors–I’ve had enough surprises to last me through my 40s, thank you. So I left the Dark Blonde on for 30 minutes, and now its–well, it’s still red, but at least a less garish shade. Now it’s more Cynthia Nixon-ish

Anyone wanna share their Haircolor Disasters and make me feel better?

2

I have medium brown hair.
I had it dyed blonde, but wanted to grow it out, so asked for brown all over.
Well.
It came out coal black.
I am quite fair.
They put dye on AND then put me under a dryer!!!
asshats!

3

I’ve eaten at Joe’s. It was quite good.

I’ve never dyed my hair. I think every time I get the urge, I’ll reread this thread. :smiley:

4

My 14-yr old son was in China with my brother over Christmas.

He e-mailed me to ask if he could get “blue tips” put in his hair. I said WTH, go ahead.

His hair is very dark brown.

He e-mailed me later that the salon had bleached his hair first, so that the blue would take; but that the ends looked rather green instead of blue.

When I picked him up at the airport, I just about fell out. He looked like a dandelion !!! :stuck_out_tongue:

The guy at the salon had bleached my kid’s hair three times to get the darkness out. The result: a very fried poof of orangy-yellow hair. The blue/green tips washed out within a week. Yech.

5

So Eve, how you doin’? :wink:

6

Don’t worry Eve, you’re just darling as a redhead!

7

Oh Eve!! No no no no no!

I was living vicariously through you! Storing up strength to get mine done. (eventually - I’m beginning to have this Yvonne DeCarlo thing going on) And what you were planning sounded so pretty and “planned”. <<sigh>> I’m just so sorry.

I’m a little wary of getting my hair done.

In College, I went in with shoulder length wavy brown hair and asked for something stylish and easy to maintain. I left looking exactly like Barney Rubble - but taller. The stylist turned me away from the mirror and just wouldn’t stop cutting. I think she was waiting for the manager to leave. Bleached blond, 1 1/2 in length, all over my head. Didn’t have my hair cut for 3 years after that.

Just after graduation, I went to a salon and got a spiral perm. I looked like the triangle haired girl in the Dilbert cartoon.

My hair is now waist length and just started getting it trimmed about 6 months ago. The stylist is trying to make me comfortable with the whole thing - earn my trust, so to speak. Hair care as therapy!

I think Cynthia Nixon’s hair is good - I hope you can be happy with it!

8

I got red highlights yesterday, and I am loving it. Though it’s a bit startling every time I look in the mirror and see that my hair is DIFFERENT.

Though while I was sitting there with all that foil in my hair, I was praying that it would look all right…I’ve never done anything with permanent hair color.

9

I’m blonde, but I love both auburn hair and midnight black hair. My mother, who had your basic brown hair, just loves my blonde hair.

So I decided to go auburn when I was in college. I knew if I showed up with my hair dyed, I would never hear the end of it. So I had it planned perfectly - it was 10 weeks till I was supposed to go home, and the temporary hair color was supposed to wash out in 6-8 weeks.

Well, it never washed quite all the way out. Which meant I went home with a nice orangy-pink shade to my hair. After the expected reaction - “What have you done to your hair!” - Mom helped me re-dye it to its natural color.

But I still haven’t heard the end of it - 20 years later!

10

Wow, Eve, did you complain to managment? All that dyeing cannot be good for your hair.

astro, is that an actual picture of our Eve? She’s gorgeous, but where’s the lorgnette?

11

I don’t have one myself–never having knock on wood had such an Evil Stylist–but my mother showed up in town last month with what I can only describe as RED Hair.

And not the coppery orange we normally associate with “red” when it comes to hair. No. This was closer to hot pink than orange. Red like fire-engine-red. Red like checkered tablecloths. Red like a cardinal in full feather.

Oh. My. God. In sunlight it literally looked neon. And she’d pencilled her eyebrows the exact same color.

But I think the real tragedy was that she liked it! Had done it at home, so the color was blotchy in places and deep in others, and she still liked it! Didn’t see anything wrong with it! I didn’t even know what to say to her. I just worked on swallowing and not staring.

FTR, my mother was born a natural redhead, but over the years it has faded into a dark brown; she’s dyed it back to red for years. She used to have it done professionally; it always looked great.

Now it’s evident that she’s lost her mind. :eek:

12

Looooocy, you’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do!

Eve, I feel your pain. My hair was at one point, patriotic: red, white and blue (well actually white, red and blue-black, but lets not quibble). I was about 14 and decided that I wanted to get rid of my newly dyed blue-black fright-wig and go for the California Girl look (that you couldn’t get away from in the late 60s). So I bought me a box of Summer Blonde.

My hair was long and the stuff worked at the roots turning them white, changed middle section to bright red and did nothing at all to the bottom third. I spend an entire day at Lord & Taylor having my hair stripped and dyed back to my natural chestnut color. My mother still hasn’t let me forget it either and it’s been well over 20 years - over 30, in fact.

13

Well, my hair is light auburn. And one day I went to pick up a perscription…it wasn’t ready, so I was killing time in the store and I wandered down the hair color aisle. So I was thinking to myself, “hmmmmm…my hair is bound to start getting gray one of these days, so maybe I should start looking into a shade that matches my real hair color so I’ll be ready when I need it.” (Can you tell how bored I was?) Anyway, I saw this stuff that matched my own color pretty well on the box picture, and I was reaching for it, just to read the label. BUT…just ABOVE that box was another box that had a pic of a lady with hair the color mine was when I was in my early twenties (mine has darkened, as hair tends to do) and I thought “hey, I am starting vacation today, and maybe it would be fun to see if I can do something fun with my hair…if it is awful, I can wash it out by the time I have to go back to work!” So I bought the stuff, took it home and used it. It only took TEN MINUTES…I mean, how much damage can you do to your hair in TEN MINUTES? Well, I rinsed it and wrapped it in a towel. A few minutes later, I started unwrapping the towel, looking in the mirror. I immediately rewrapped the towel and sat down FAST. I thought for a bit, and decided that I must have been overreacting. I started unwrapping the towel again. Nope, NOT overreacting.

Think Rhonda Fleming in “A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” here, Eve honey…maybe no one else knows who she is, but I am sure YOU do.

Never in my WHOLE life has my hair been THAT color.

No problem, I say to myself. I wash it three times. No change. Bear in mind that this was semi-permanent hair color, supposed to wash out in 18 washes or so (as I recall, but it turned out to not matter anyway.) I wash it three more times. No change. I am starting to panic. I wash it with DISHWASHING LIQUID! THREE TIMES!!! NO CHANGE!!! I run to the salon down the street and buy STRIPPING SHAMPOO. I wash it three more times. NO CHANGE!

After I had washed it 18 times with the stripping shampoo, I finally got upset. I called the number on the box, and explained my problem to the nice lady. She said…“What color WAS your hair?” Auburn, I say. “Well, if you use red hair color on red hair, the effect is going to be more intense, and more difficult to remove.” Okay, well so what do I DO? “What shade did you use?” I tell her. “But, that is the EXOTICS line…” she says. It can’t be, I say, on the box it looked like the color my hair was when I was in my early twenties. Let me check the box. Sure enough, it was the exotics line. I ask her what this means. “Well, that is the line for people who want their hair to be…like…magenta, you know, or other colors NOT usually seen in nature.” BUt the picture on the BOX…my hair WAS that color at one point!!! "Well, you aren’t suppose to be using it THAT way, you were supposed to choose a color from the REGULAR line…you probably should have used “Desert Sunrise” (BIG surprise, that was the color I was REACHING for when I saw this other box…)

Okay, I say, WHY isn’t it washing out? “Well, it isn’t just a matter of washing it 18 times…they factor in time and fading from exposure to the sun…plus, when you apply red on RED, it doesn’t fade all that fast.”

“So what can I DOOOOOOOOo?” (I was wailing by now…)

Well, the nice lady said, you can call back Monday when our color specialist is in, and he can tell you what color to re-dye it with to tone it down.

At this point, the LAST thing I wanted to do was dye my hair AGAIN…it might turn out PURPLE! So I thanked the nice lady for her help and decided to just live with it.

It faded some, but it never EVER completely went away. Every time I got my hair cut, my hairdresser smirked. I could hear her thinking to herself that if I had just let HER dye my hair, I wouldn’t be IN this mess. It finally went away when my hair grew out far enough for me to tell her to just CHOP IT OFF!

Best comment (from a patient in my office) “CHERI! You dyed your hair! I LOVE it…you look so…FRENCH!” [sub]But…I don’t WANT to look FRENCH, I want to look like…ME!!![/sub]

I am sure you can tell by the length of this post that the memory still rankles. :slight_smile:

14

And here I’ve dyed my hair most of these colors on purpose…

15

Thank you for sharing your pain with us, Eve, but your predicament has led to a question I have. I color my own hair to hide the gray and I’m happy with the results. I have dark brown hair about 30% gray and I use a red hair coloring which I rinse off after 15 minutes ( less than what it says on the package so that my hair’s not too red). I’d like to start high-lighting my hair as well. Can I do this during the same coloring session? That is, can I get to the point where my hair is rinsed of the color and is towel dry? I can apply the high lighting mixture on top of the new color? Please let me know.

16

Some of us were born with that colour you ended up with, and hated. I’ve learned to live with it.

Carrot tops, by the way, are green.

17

But Gingy, yours is NATURALLY that color, so it looks GOOD on you. (VERY good, BTW :slight_smile: )

Besides, I think Eve was talking about more like sort of dark orangeish, not the beautiful shade YOURS is.

And I was talking about FLAME RED. Not ANYONE’S natural color, or at least anyone I have ever seen.

Of course, green would have been much worse, so maybe I should be feeling thankful. :wink:

18

medstar, l’oreal has a colour line called couleur experte, that does what you want. there is the main colour and then a highlight colour that you use after. my cuz has tried it with good results.

19

The very first time I colored my hair, it was for a Halloween costume. I made myself a green satin gown with silver trim - going as a sorceress. I decided the crowning touch would be to dye my hair red. So I bought a light auburn that claimed to be temporary. It wasn’t. Fortunately, the color was flattering - my natural color is a light brown that turns really blond in the sun.

Since then, I’ve gone red several times - usually with good results. Once I went darker than I intended and it definitely looked dyed, but it faded to a tolerable shade in a few weeks. It’s been a while since I went red. Dunno if I’ll ever do it again.

20

Yes, Scotticher, that Rhonda Fleming “clown orange” is exactly what I wound up with! Now it’s a dark coppery red–very nice, I suppose, but I am still in Rhonda Shock and no longer strust my senses.

Astro, it’s like you snuck into my apartment with a camera! Ummmm, you didn’t, did you?