The nice thing I find with henna is that if you slop over into the already colored stuff, you can’t really tell. “They” tell me that repeated applications of henna will produce a darker red, so you’d expect some stripes where the roots meet the colored stuff, if you’re not precise with your coverage, but that has not been a problem for me. I just make a part with a rat tail, use my irrigation syringe to squirt some “mud” on, and smear it around with a finger and make another part 1/3 inch away. The back I do by feeling where the part is.
With henna, covering the length (especially if you have long hari) is actually a bit trickier than with chemical dyes, for your first use. That’s because henna paste is thick, like mud, and it can be tricky to get every strand covered. Sometimes you end up with “ropes” of hair which are actually still dry in the center. Small sections are key to ensure complete coverage. The roots are much easier in comparison to the length, if you have long hair.
I don’t think roots with henna are any more difficult than roots with chemical dye, though. At this point I’ve been doing it for, literally, most of my life (with synthetics or with henna), so maybe I’m desensitized to the difficulty, though.
And I didn’t mean difficult, as in difficult to do physically, but difficult to do so it comes out looking right. Not just the roots either, but getting good, even coverage all over your head. As I said earlier, I colored my own hair for at least 25 years. One day a hairdresser showed me the back and sides of my head in a BIG mirror under a strong, bright light, and I could clearly see the lines where old color met new color…faded lines, to be sure, but noticeable. My hair wasn’t that long, maybe chin length.
The thing about the salon where I go now is that they thoroughly and meticulously section my hair into thin sections and really saturate it evenly all over my head. Even my previous hairdressers were not as thorough. My color now lasts a long time because it’s applied so well. When you’re trying to cover a lot of gray or white roots, this matters a lot.
OTOH I have a girlfriend who’s in her 70’s and has always colored her own hair a light reddish blond, and it looks fabulous. I believe she is an exception. A lucky exception.
I guess so. I have to be honest, I don’t really care if I have some uneven lines with a big mirror under a bright light, because no one else is looking at my hair that closely!
But I did just look, under my husband’s workbench magnifier light thingy, and I can’t see a thing. The back is still a little wet, but the only lines I see are light reflections. Did we mention that henna makes your hair really freaking shiny?
By the way, it’s easier to color the back of your head than take a decent picture of it.
I’m a guy who uses Just For Men. If I didn’t, my hair would be snow white. I shouldn’t complain, I guess, because my mother’s side of the family ran to premature gray and my dad’s side to premature bald. I’ve still got most of my hair, but I started getting grey hair when I was in high school. My mother’s hair was solid white by the time she was in her early 60s and I have apparently followed in her footsteps.
It’s funny how gray/white hair ages some people, but not others. I guess it depends on skin tone or something.
I have a girlfriend who’s in her mid-60’s. She had been coloring her hair for years and as she got older, it just didn’t look quite right. She always did it herself, so I don’t know what it would have looked like if she had gone to a professional and gotten exactly the right color for her. Finally she let it go completely gray/white and it easily took 10 years off her age. She has blue eyes and beautiful skin, translucent, with a natural blush (think of Lily in “Cold Case”) and the hair color was emphasizing whatever lines and wrinkles she had.
With totally gray & white hair she is luminous! I’ve seen this with women (I guess men, too) who have winter or summer coloring. We autumns and springs don’t do so well in gray.
Spending $1200+ a year on hair-coloring seems kind of unaffordable for most people. I’ve never noticed any stripes on my friends’ home dye-jobs, so it’s hard to believe this expense is necessary to get a decent result.
That’s why I stopped getting my hair highlighted :nodding:
I haven’t seen stripes either but I can usually guess which is the home job vs. the salon. Home hair dye tends to be “flat” (think all one color) whereas natural color is actually a melange of different shades. Hair stylists are trained to mimic those different shades when coloring. My old stylist would mix three or four different shades of gold/bronze for my highlights.
Same here – I am maybe 25-30% grey (at 35) and dye my hair every 6 weeks or so, and I can’t afford to have it professionally colored at that rate. Even henna would be a big jump up (at around $20 an application to my current $8), besides it being more of a hassle. Going from spending ~$64/year on my hair color to over $1000 is just not possible, although I bet it would indeed look better if the pros did it.
