Question about coloring hair/dyes

In My Humble Opinion
1

I want my hair to be blue. An almost metallic blue color. Kinda like this: :eek: , but I’ll settle for anything as dark as: :frowning: . My natural hair color is a light brown, almost dirty-blondish color. I’m looking for something that’s semi-permanent, and will last for a while (multiple washings).

My hair is naturally soft. VERY VERY soft. I’d like to retain this softness after dying-- or at least most of it. I don’t want my hair to be hard, sticky, thick, or otherwise nasty.

Does anyone have any suggestions on which products work well and pretty much nail my requirements on the head? :smiley:

I’ve looked around, but I don’t think the stuff I need comes from Wal*Mart for $4.99. I hate to sound anal, but everytime I try to color my hair with a non-normal color, I have to buy an unheard of brand that leaves my hair nasty and the color barely noticeable. I want to avoid all that… and I’m sure a few people here have colored their hair in this manner, and know what works :slight_smile:

2

:eek: Mon frere! Or ma soere, whatever. The point is I will looking foward to replies to this thread. I too, have always wanted blue hair, tho preferable this :frowning: or even darker. Preferably the color it was in that dream I had…

Currently I dye my hair black, I was thinking in terms of dying the roots (I’m sort of a medium brown) and going from there.

Can you get a real blue without bleaching it out first? Can you get a nice deep, not candy-colored blue, anywhere?

Hope I’m not stepping on you thread, Civil, I’ve been wondering about this myself.

Anyone?

3

IANA hairstylist, but I had my (brown) hair colored red not too long ago. The colorist bleached out sections of my hair first and then put the red dye on all of my hair. Result: the bleached portions had a really vivid true red color, while the unbleached sections just had a reddish tint.
I think if you want that real Crayola color you’ve gotta bleach first. Otherwise you’ll just have blueish light brown hair. Basically, I think your choices are permanent/true color or semi-permanent/tint. BTW, my hair felt fine afterward and still does. Very soft and shiny. Use better quality products and you shouldn’t end up with nasty hair. Let us know how it turns out.

4

I’d go with a pro on this one. Ask your friends for a good colorist.

5

I agree here. I’d get professional service for the first round, and ask their advice about doing it yourself after that. Also, if something goes wrong, you have someone (or some company) to blame!

6

There is no way to get jaw-dropping colors without bleach, which will screw up your hair royally. It’ll make your hair a little brittle and straw-like. You can safely bleach your hair about twice without doing serious damange. I’ve done three times, but that is pushing it.

If you want to go through with it, just pick up some bleach and creme developer (the bleach will be powered- it should cost five dollars or so) and a vat of hair dye (My favorite shocking blue is Punky Color’s “Violet”- which actually turns out a bright and deep slightly purplish blue). Bleach according to the directions. Before you dye, slather vasaline around your hairline and your ears so your skin won’t stain, then apply the dye- using rubber gloves or plastic baggies, and keep it on for a couple hours (the dye won’t hurt your hair- it only coats it) and keep it warm (I wrap it in plastic wrap and beanies, or use a blowdryer).

The results will be spectacular, and will be brilliant for about six weeks. After that you have to redye it (which won’t hurt your hair), bleach it out (which screws up your hair and doesn’t always work) or dye a conventional color over it. Dyeing a darkish conventional color over it almost always looks good.

If you have long hair, I wouldn’t do it. But if you have short and/or fast growing hair, I’d say go for it. Your hair is always going to grow back, but there is only going to be a little bit of your life that you can have brightly colored hair and get away with it. I’ve had pink or blue hair for four years, and it really is a lot of fun. Little kids love it. A pretty surprising amount of old people love it (If I had a nickle for every middle aged lady that says she wishes she had the guts to dye her hair…) and you have the great advantage of never having to worry about what your wearing (or if you’ve just rolled out of bed) because you’ll always look interesting.

7

Blue hair is great!

I nuked my hair white then put Fudge “Blue Velvet” through it. Very nice. Check out my page http://www.maxxxie.net/ and click the “Max the Blue-haired Freak” link.

The pictures don’t really do it justice. It was very vibrant indeed.

I loved it but it was very high maintenance! Because of the bleaching required, my hair was a bit unhappy (read: brittle). I had to wash it with protein-enhancing crap to soften it and repair the damage.

It also grew out after a few weeks and after 6 weeks the blue had faded sufficiently that it needed to be re-done.

I had complete strangers stop me in the street and tell me how good it looked! People would just strike up conversation with me! I loved it :slight_smile:

Go ahead and do it, if only once in your life! You won’t regret it :slight_smile:

Max.

8

Consider using hydrogen peroxide. With food coloring thrown in with the sun. Its fun! Get your hair really dirty and it takes.

9

Like others have said, you’d have to bleach your hair first then apply a dye if you want a vibrant colour.

Also second what Maxxxie said. A male friend of mine bleached then used “Blue Velvet” (www.fudge.com) last summer. It looked great! Very blue!

The colour only lasted a few weeks, however, before a touch-up was required.* (There’s enough in a tube for a re-dye though.) A female friend did the bleaching and dying for us (in contrast to the blue, my hair was vibrant red :cool: ) and it wasn’t a particularly difficult or painful process.

Have fun! Funky coloured hair is a great way to meet people – like even sven and Max said, friendly strangers will crack a joke or give you a compliment.

  • We were swimming in lakes and at the beach almost every day, so that probably had something to do with that.
10

My boyfriend used Blue Velvet fudge to dye his hair and got great results. I don’t know how available fudge is in the US - IIRC it’s an Australian brand. Unfortunately blue doesn’t tend to last as well as colours like red and pink, and as it starts to fade you get a yucky greyish colour.

11

I have used Manic Panic in red and blue. I didn’t bleach first, and my hair is naturally medium dark brown. I left it on for about 2 hours, wrapped in foil and plastic to keep it warm. )I did chunks of color, not my whole head.) They both faded in about 2 weeks, which is what I was going for, although there was residual color from the blue for almost a year, as a sort of green color, but it looked pretty neat anyway.

A friend used purple Manic Panic over her brown hair, and it was PURPLE for 2 weeks, then faded a little.

Have a good time. I wish I could still do funky colors, but would probably get bounce out of my company if I did anything besides red. Blue is a definite no-no now. :frowning:

12

I’ve been dying my hair for a little over five years, it’s been every shade of red imaginable, blue, and various chunks of purple, pink, fuschia and blue at different times.

The colors I’ve used have all been Raw Color hair dye, which doesn’t have a website apparently, but you can get it at any Hot Topic. The blue I used was Peek-A-Blue. On bleached hair, it’s a pretty vibrant solid royal blue. I used it most recently over a light brown (dyed light brown, that might make a difference) and it came out like in these pictures. The lighting wasn’t good and the camera was crappy, but it’s pretty dark, solid, but glowy blue. So if you want something brighter, I’d definitely bleach first. The Raw Color stuff is great, it’s a goppy kind of gel/cream, you just put it on and distribute it through your hair, let it sit 15-20 minutes (I usually do 20, though it says 15 on the bottle), and rinse thoroughly. It’s “demi-permanent” which means it lasts anywhere from a couple of weeks, to the point of annoyance, depending on how much it takes to your hair. The blue lasted an abnormally long time for me. Many months later there was still a faint greenish tinge to it. (And this last time I got so fed up that it wouldn’t go away I just dyed black over it. There’s a thread somewhere about me wanting it to grow out faster.) Bonus: It’s completely vegan with no animal products at all, and most of the varieties smell really good. The blue I used - smelled like blueberries. My red smells like cinnamon and “candy pink” smells very strongly like cotton candy.

I stay away from any hair dye that has to be processed with heat – I don’t even own a blow dryer, and I never heat style my hair at all, and I think this has contributed to the continuing shininess and non-brittleness of my hair even after five and a half straight years of dying without a break.

If you want to keep your hair healthy and not brittle/broken/screwed all to hell, then I have one word for you. Conditioner! Good coniditioner, and lots of it. Get one specially formulated for colored hair. Also a for-colored-hair shampoo will help keep it from fading. Slather the conditioner on liberally after you shampoo, and let it sit for at least five minutes, then rinse, but don’t rinse quite all the way… your hair should still feel a little bit slippery. And then rinse in cool water, and if at all possible, let air-dry. Hair dryers are the bane of my existence, even though my hair’s really thick and takes forever to dry, if I used a hair dryer it would be frizzy and awful and humongous. If you need more conditioning, I suggest a Vitamin E serum (I use something called [I think] InstantHairRepair. It’s a transparent purple goo in a squeeze bottle, they have it at Wal-Mart), which you put on while your hair is wet, comb through and leave in. It’s been a god-send to me. Conditioner is a hair-dyer’s best friend.

13

One of the nicest jobs I had on my hair was blue & black. My hair was bleached white - then streaked black and then colored blue. It ended up looking metalic and glossy thanks to the black - but the condition was bad. I used frequent leave in treatments.

Crazy colors don’t take well without bleach. When they start to fade they look really mucky too. Blue ends up a kind of moss green on bleached hair - but it is great while it is fresh.

Back when I had my weird hair and piercings people used to get beaten up for looking funny.