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

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

One time I planned to bleach strips of my hair and use a Manic Panic dye on it, called “Vampire Red”. It’s a temporary vegetable-dye and the swatch at Sally’s, done on white plastic, was an extremely dark burgundy, quite nice. So I bleached the strips (more than I originally planned, because I fell in love with the colour sample!) and applied the MP the next day.

It… uh… wasn’t exactly burgundy. It was actually the red that Elmo from Sesame Street is, seriously. I didn’t mind it since I was 17 and had had purple streaks before that, except that it was permanent. A month later, roots were growing in, and I used colour stripping shampoo 8 times; the only difference was that the top 1/4" had faded to a slightly more orange-toned Elmo red.

Did I mention that I had senior pictures to take three weeks from then?

So I bought a box of L’Oreal Feria in Deep Currant. It’s supposed to be a burgundy brown. It turned orange and made half of my hair fall out! :eek:

I had to call L’Oreal’s help line, and they sent to me, free, boxes of a “medium reddISH BROWN”. Praying that my poor hair would take this abuse and still look decent for senior pictures, I used the dye.

Medium reddish brown apparently means, to my hair, “Irish Red”. Luckily my complexion matched it fine (even though my natural colour is ash brown), so I said, “Fine! I give up!” and kept it that way.

22

S’okay, baby, dark coppery red is very flattering, I am sure. Trust me, I am sure you look BEOOOTIFUL!!!

23

Three weeks ago I decided to try a new shade/brand of permanent dye. The damned stuff turned my hair a color, well, the developers must have been imagining a sunset after nuclear war as inspiration. It was a sort of white zinfandel with carrot juice chaser puked up on a bale of straw. I crept to the store the next day (where the man I’m sure I had been destined to marry was blinded by the radioactive glow of my hair and ran away shrieking) and bought a box of dye that managed to make me look like a paticularily clumsy goth. The next box did nothing, same vampire wannabe color. The fourth box wasn’t so bad, a little light, more gold than ash the way I prefer. The good news is, and take heart from this Eve dear, is that now it’s faded a bit and become the best color I’ve ever had.

Now my friend Becky, she died her white-blond hair black with a semi-permanent dye and then went swimming. Her hair was khaki green for a couple of months. And my sister had hers dyed before her wedding and it turned Raggedy Ann red. Many tears till that was fixed.

24

So what y’all are telling me is… when people try desperately to convince me that I ought to be a redhead for a month, I should look at them funny and take off running, is that it?

25

Well, all I can say is…

A) If you only want to be a redhead for a month, don’t use Clairol Natural Instincts[sup]TM[/sup].

B) If, OTOH, you want a hair dye that will LAST, DO use it.

It is only supposed to last through 24 shampoos. ( I looked it up online, I was wrong about the 18 shampoos thing.) They underestimate themselves.

S’all I am saying.

26

One of the funniest intentionally weird color jobs I’ve seen was a kid mowing a lawn… and his hair was the exact same color as the grass he was mowing!

27

I’ve never colored my hair. Guys didn’t do that, when I had hair, and it would be a waste, now. And, I would really, really be unhappy were I to end up with a flaming red scalp! There are a couple of guys at work who do. Personally, I think the chinese guy, whose name is Alfred, of all things, looks pretty silly as a redhead. But, it’s his life.

I also wanted to thank you all, and especially Eve for sharing your horror stories in such an amusing fashion and making me laugh so hard. I came in here, looking for a laugh, so I could forget that…ummm…hmm!.. well, good work, folks! :slight_smile:

Oh, and DeVena? Yvonne DeCarlo? Yummm! I’m so old. Most of these children probably don’t even know who she was.

28

Well, I’ve been getting my hair colored for about ten years now, trying to stick close to my natural color – why do hairdressers ALWAYS want to go lighter? – and in recent months decided to save $$ and do it myself. Except for grabbing the wrong box off the shelf so ending up one shade darker than my normal mousy brown, no problems. So far. (Knocking wood frantically.)

But perms are another story. I learned a lesson: Don’t EVER get a perm unless you know and trust, trust, TRUST your hairdresser. And even then, be prepared. I have thick, fine, limp hair. Over a year ago, when it was about ear length, I asked for a body perm. We’d just moved; the woman had cut my hair three times (I was trying to grow it out) and done quite well, I thought. I WARNED her that my hair takes a perm well. I WARNED her that she should use the mildest perm available.

So what do I end up with? A brillo pad. My hair looked like I’d stuck my finger in the light socket. And it was so badly burned I could use two hot oil treatments a day and it was STILL bone-dry.

I gave up, went elsewhere, got it all cut off, and have just gotten the nerve to take the plunge again. With a GOOD hairdresser this time. Plus I know where he lives. :slight_smile: I got the body perm I wanted a year ago. He hasn’t even been able to complain about my doing my color myself, it looks as nice as when he did it and costs me about 1/5 as much!

29

Ohhhh - I have a bad tale to tell about L’Oreal’s Couleur Experte.

I saw the ads, I had a 20% coupon at Ulta, I was ready to go. My natural color is…ummm…well, a dark brown, but I have been successfully coloring it at home for many years. I usually tend to go for the auburn browns, since I do have auburn highlights naturally.

So, last Friday night I selected a Couler Experte double process (AT HOME!) shade that is medium-dark brown with the accompanying hightlights.

So, Monday night I finally screw up my courage to attempt the double process. I do the all-over dye first. It looks wonderful. Then I start the second process. I follow all of the instructions to the letter, and admisister the highlights. The applicator is like a big old mascara wand - how hard could this be? The istructions said that the applied highlights would NOT bleed.

I set the timer and wait.

So, then I rinse them out. HOLY SHIT! I now have a dark brown underlayer with a BRIGHT ORANGE overlayer. Yes. Two tone, and not in the good and trendy way. Ok, some people could carry off what I had done to myself, but not ME.

What else could I do? I was tempted to go to the all night Jewel and get SOMETHING to color over it, but I was also afraid that my hair would fall out at the roots.

So I went to work the next day. Be thankful, Eve, that you did this on a Friday. The next day, EVERYONE at work asked me, “Did you color your hair?” “Yes, I said, and I did it myself. Believe me, leave it to the experts.”

So, yesterday, I went to Ulta again, got a tried and true Lumia Chestnut Petals box, and redyed my hair. I wanted to give it a couple of days to rest.

And - it is STILL way lighter on the top, but not nearly as bad. I’m taking the advice of my blonde friend now, and leaving the highlighting to the experts from now on.

I’m SO SORRY about your experience, but maybe you can take solace in some of my self-mutilation.

And, bye the bye, you SERIOUSLY ROCK, Eve. Never had the opportunity until now to let you know. Former Philly girls need to stick together, ya know?

30

Never trust a product with ungrammatical French on the packaging.

31

Yeah, maybe I should have known!

32

Oh, that’s sweet, dear. I don’t know if I actually rock, but I do a mean Two Step.

By the way, I like what Scott Peterson’s done to his hair–wonder who did his dye job? “Hi, I want that ‘I just killed my wife and I’m on the lam’ dark ash blond?”

33

I like to be a Suicide Redhead-and I’ve NEVER had a problem. Weird.

Bad perms, on the other hand, I’ve had.

34

I am a natural blonde. The color of my hair has been darkening over the years, though, so I usually dye my hair either a lighter shade of blonde or a darker shade of brown. I’m extremely pale, though, so my sister insisted on dying my hair burgundy. It doesn’t look that bad. And I really am Irish, so it works.

My horror story, though, takes place several years ago, while I was in high school and was still a nice blonde girl.

I decided to put blue streaks in my hair.

My best friend, who has hair of that shade of dark brown that is almost black (in fact, I thought her hair was black for the first three years I knew her), had bought a jar of Manic Panic in a vibrant blue (think Grover from Sesame Street) to streak her own hair, and we figured we might as well do mine, too.

Hers came out great.

Mine looked really good until I went to rinse the dye out. You see, when I rinsed, the dye-ful water got all over the undyed portions of my hair, and dyed them, too. Instead of having blonde hair with blue streaks, I had blue hair with darker blue streaks.

The dye was supposed to be temporary and wash out in three weeks. It didn’t.

It faded. It faded to a horrible penicillin blue-green color. I looked like a zombie with mold growing all over my head.

And it didn’t wash out. I had zombie hair for a year, until it finally got long enough for me to trim the blue off. (I had short hair.)

My friends used to say I looked like Kurt Cobain because of the way my hair was done back then (I’m a girl, but they still thought I looked like Kurt Cobain), so you can imagine all the stupid comments they made at the lunch table the first day they saw my zombie-moldy-hair.

35

racinchikki, if you had used a cap, you wouldn’t have had that problem.

36

[James Bond]“As long as the collar and cuffs match…”[/JB]
:wink:

37

Guinastasia, we were 16 and we ruled the earth - we never dreamed that we’d need something so prosaic as a cap. :wink:

38

I thought it was “the carpet and the drapes.”

But anyway. I’d like to think this experience is Eve’s punishment for making fun of us Suicide Redheads… but I have too much sympathy to say that out loud. On a related note, I have two different boxes of haircolor here in red shades, and I think I am gonna try some self-highlighting. If I turn out highly comical, I will be sure to let Eve be the first to gloat.

39

Ironically, he originally planned on dying his hair red as well. But the salon was out of his favorite shade - ‘come and get me’ copper.

40

I’m one of those girls who likes to dye her hair bright blue and magenta and neon purple and all kinds of wildly unnatural colors.

The thing with these dyes is they look absolutly breathtaking for about seven weeks. Then they just look faded and root-ridden. And if there is one thing I can’t stand, it’s having hair dye degradation.

There are a few things you can do. One is to try to bleach out the color. This has worked for me several times, leaving me with a glamorous bleach blonde that eventually works well as my natural hair color (havn’t seen that in four years!) grows out. But sometimes the whole bleach thing goes horribly wrong. Several times I’ve tried to bleach out wine-red color and ended up with the color of hot pink highlighter ink mixed with the puke of someone who recently drank weak carrot juice. Additionally, my white-blonde roots made it look like my hair was thinning. Ewww! Another time, I tried to bleach out purple and ended up with blonde hair streaked with the kinds of greens and blues found in a peacock. It was kind of cool, but not the sort of thing I’d want on my head. Bleaching bad dye out rarely works as well as I’d hope it would.

So the next defence is to dye your hair a permanent natural-ish haircolor. Once I tried a good medium brown, thinking that it would blend in with my natural hair color and look somewhat nice. Ugh. It made me look like the plainest girl on Earth. Next time I needed to make up for a bad bleach-out, I tried a red. It was kind of a cool color, but it was really really boring (after four years of mostly bright-pink hair, looking in the mirrior and seeing a color that could conceivably grow on someone’s head is a bit of a letdown) and it was permanent so there was no way to get rid of it except bleaching it out (and likely having the bleach job turn out bad). Additionally, it looked bad with all my clothes. Coppery brown does not go with my favorite pink sweater. Ever.

And thus goes the vicious hair dye cycle. When my hair is bright, I always keep wishing it was normal so I could get a job/wear a wider variety of clothes/have a more veratile look. But when it is normal, I get bored and sick of it and wish I had bright hair so that I could make children smile and feel special all the time. So my life is just a matter of dyeing my hair, trying to get rid of the dye, and the dyeing it again. Because there is only a number of times you can bleach your hair before it falls out, and a few things that never really get resolved well (like roots) and a limited amout of money to spend on dyes, it’s become a bit of a science. A very frusterating and ultimatly fruitless science.

So I dyed my hair black last time it turned out bad. It was a risky move for a very pale natural blonde. I thought I was going to look like a sickly goth girl. But it worked out. I look kind of like Snow White. Don’t even ask me how I’m ever going to get rid of it. There is no good way to transition out of black hair.