It’s time to cast aside my light brown hair that I’ve had for a good while and to replace them with something new. So does anyone have any good ways on to bleach my hair? Any Products/Procedures to avoid? Right now, my hair is about an inch long on top and shaved with a #2 razor on the back, so there is a bit of hair there.
Avoid hydrogen peroxide. I spent 2-1/2 months in high school with orange hair as a result.
Balthisar Blame your hairdresser, not hydrogen peroxide. Anyway, if the color goes wrong you can always have it dyed again. Personally I can’t recommend bleaching your hair, it harms your hair and scalp and when the bleach grows out you’ll like mighty stupid unless you start bleaching it every few weeks. That, as you can imagine, can quite literally scorch your precious scalp and damage it for good. Oh, and be cool - stay in school. Winners don’t use drugs.
Balthisar Blame your hairdresser, not hydrogen peroxide. Anyway, if the color goes wrong you can always have it dyed again. Personally I can’t recommend bleaching your hair, it harms your hair and scalp and when the bleached hair grows out you’ll look mighty stupid unless you start bleaching it every few weeks. That, as you can imagine, can quite literally scorch your precious scalp and damage it for good. Oh, and be cool - stay in school. Winners don’t use drugs.
I once bleached my hair and it came out in three distinct stripes: brown at the roots, orange in the middle and blond at the tips. My friend nearly died laughing. Luckily I was only bleaching it in order to dye it red. As for advice, I think any product that will bleach your hair in any significant way is probably going to harm it, but then again, you might as well live a little, especially since your hair is not very long anyway. What I would say is maybe buy a back-up bottle of a colour you wouldn’t terribly mind, just in case you get the scary orange stripey look.
UselessGit, yeah, um, well, that hairdresser was me :).
If you’re trying to go blond, pay a professional to do it. I have bleached and dyed my hair more times (and more colors) than I can count, but going blond is a different story. Different parts of your hair will respond differently to bleach depending on your hair type, how long/old it is (older hair tends to become more porous), how close it is to the root (temperature effects bleaching a great deal), how much oil is on the hair strands (which is variable) and probably a lot of other things. The colors being somewhat uneven didn’t matter to me, as the dark blues and purples I prefer tend to camouflage that. But if you’re going blond, it’ll be obvious.
A lot of bleaching is required to turn brown hair blond. A colorist not only knows how to apply the bleach properly, but because they can see and easily manipulate all of your hair, they’ll be able to avoid getting it all over your scalp. You won’t. That much bleaching WILL hurt your scalp (I seriously burned my scalp messing around before I knew what I was doing.)
Bleaching it isn’t enough. You must tone your hair afterwards to achieve a decent looking blond (the closest you’ll get otherwise is blotchy and unattractive lemon yellow - and that’s with a lot of bleaching.) A stylist ought to be able to select the proper toner for the hair type and color you want to achieve, and it’s quite easy to mess that up.
Real blond hair is generally quite “dimensional” - there are a lot of different colors, since natural blond hair bleaches quite easily from the sun. You won’t be able to recreate that effect yourself (although having highlights done professionally is quite expensive.)
A lot of products are badly formulated, and without either experience or specific advice from someone who knows these things, you’ll probably end up with the wrong product and it won’t do what you want.
Bottom line: home bleach jobs for guys seem to be all the rage now, but they look stupid. Don’t be the guy with the orangey-blond, straw-like hair; messing around with your hair color is a wonderful thing - permanent dyes are extremely easy to use, and it’s tough but not too tough to dye your hair an improbable shade of blue or green or whatever, but going blond is much, much more difficult. I have a great deal of personal experience, and I’ve read enough about it that I’ve run into hairstylists who didn’t know as much as I do, but for going blond, you need someone else’s help just to physically apply the products properly, and you need someone who is extensively experienced and skillful to make it look halfway decent.
Ugh. If I had a nickel for every time I cringed upon seeing some guy with ugly, ugly yellow hair, usually uneven and sometimes in a pathetic attempt at highlights, I’d be able to quit my job and live off the interest.
So if I wanted to do this thing by myself then the idea of leaving it blonde is out. Thanks for the advice everyone, looks like it saved my some hassle. Now I just have to figure out a colour that I wouldn’t mind my hair being.
If you haven’t colored your hair before, the easiest way to go is to just get a box of a permanent color from a drugstore or KMart or someplace like that. It’ll have the gloves, the bottle, and directions, and it’s quite simple to do. Doing anything else is complicated, and you’ll also have to consider the various equipment to buy - gloves, a pigment bottle, a tint brush, and the various other stuff.
Permanent color, on the other hand, won’t damage your hair too much (although I do recommend conditioning it frequently and washing it less often, especially at first.) The simple permanent colors you find in a drug store are quite user-friendly.
What [BOLD]Excalibre[/BOLD] said, times 100. Trust us.
I found if you go from brown to blonde you have to BLEACH all the color out first. THEN redye it. I have done this at home pretty well. IF you try to go directly from brown to blonde all you get is orange.
Also this year I got a tan and since my natural hair will go up two shades thru the sun, it totally screwed up a nice dye job. It made it blonder in spots that received more sun.
Going down is easy if you go from Brown to Black there is no probs.
Well, I just bleached my hair blonde a week ago. It looks great, but I do have lots of practice.
If you want to avoid a salon, find someone that has dyed hair before- likely a punk rock girl of some sort. Don’t worry, most hair dye people love to initiate new hairdye people. As a bonus, it’s a good way to pick up on girls.
There is an art to it. But there are a lot of little random things to know. Things like how to use drabber, and how to apply heat, and how to use vasaline to avoid dyeing your ears green for weeks. You most likely know someone that knows all this out. Seek them. This knowledge has been handed down in high schools and college dorms for generations.
If you do end up bleaching your hair (I usually just use powdered hair bleach and 40 volume peroxide and it looks great) be prepared for anything. It might look good, but there is an equally likely chance it will turn orange, look totally fried, be a mass of multicolored blotchyness or something else horrible. It’s like alchemy- with the right random ingrediants and archaic procedures it might work, but it’s pretty unlikely. That never stops me from trying. Have a sense of humor and be prepared for soemthing totally unexpected.
Keep some hairdye around so you can dye your hair something decent if it looks horrible. If it looks bad, you won’t want to wait to fix it. Trust me.
And it will fuck up your hair. No getting around it. If you can’t stand hair that feels like straw, do something else. Plan things carefully- hair can usually stand to be bleached around twice before it starts getting scary, but once again, everyone’s is different. I’ve done mine three times and started to experience breakage, etc. In other words, if you are going to dye your hair blue, figure out how your gonna get it unblue, and what your gonna do about roots.
If you end up wanting to dye your hair an extreme color (blue, red, green etc.) you will have to bleach it first in order for it to look vibrant. If you don’t, at best it will only be visible in direct sunlight and will wash out in days. At worst, it’ll look dull and discolored.
And have fun. Bleaching and dyeing my hair has provided me with years of fun and enjoyment. I’ve had some awesome hair, and I’ve had some horror stories. But even though it doesn’t usually look natural and it rarely looks like a salon job, I’ve always been glad that I’ve had as much fun with my hair as possible.
I have dark brown, nearly black hair and i’ve been able to get my hair to the color od very pale whitish yellow without melting it or making it brittle. A stylist told me once that if you aregoing to do it at home, only use 30 volume beach at the strongest. 40 volume can be used but you need a professional to apply it. I usually have to do two applications to get my hair very pale yellow/whitish.
The other thing is, toner takes out the brassiness of bleach jobs and is what they use to give a true platinum (toner is blue/purple).
I also don’t bleach down to my roots, because i dye my hair unnatural colors, and the dark colors blend well with my dark roots, so you can’t tell unless i don’t keep the dye job up.