So the IL stay-at-home order has been extended to May 30, and I will be shocked if it’s not extended again after that. I had gotten a haircut and color a couple of weeks before the shutdown order, but my hair grows fast and I have a LOT of gray if I don’t color - by yesterday I had a solid inch of roots.
Figuring this was going to happen, and that there was no way Chicago would reopen by the end of April, I ordered a color kit from Sally Beauty Supply, along with real hairdresser shears and thinning shears. So last night I did my own color for the first time in many years, and my own cut for the first time ever. The cut is actually not half-bad, but a) I picked a color that was too light, so the roots are now lighter than the rest of my head, and b) I’ve been toying with the idea of giving up chemical color and switching to henna - I have been switching to cosmetic and grooming products with more natural ingredients generally. I’ve been reading up on henna and the quirks of using henna on previously colored hair, and apparently if you want to cover gray and end up with dark brown, you should do red henna first, and then dark brown henna on top of that, because the hair will take the dark brown color better?
So this OP is by way of a) asking people to share their own experiences with DIY hair maintenance during lockdown, and b) if anyone out there has concrete tips/personal experience with my particular situation, I’d love to hear it! And I’m glad I am one of those people who has always liked observing what my hairstylist is doing when I go for a haircut - it’s not the best cut I’ve ever had, and I will definitely go back to professional cuts once it’s safe to do so, but it’s not the worst, either. Having real professional equipment definitely makes a difference. (I knew this because I actually worked at Sally’s in high school, and a lot of pros used to come in there back when in IL you needed a cosmetologist license to buy many professional products.)
I was under the impression that henna couldn’t be used on gray or graying hair because it doesn’t “take”, but maybe I’m wrong? I haven’t colored my hair in years. The last time I did a DIY it was a horror show. I’m just afraid of doing similar and since I’m one of the “essential workers”, I can’t really afford to do something that could turn out drastic.
I’ve been trimming my bangs at home for years now. The simplest method I’ve found is gathering them into a ponytail, making a second ponytail to where you want to cut it, then cutting it right at the elastic. Then take your shears and snip vertically into your bangs to softly layer them. I also recommend doing this on dry hair as the shrink factor when whet can be rather significant.
How did you do your cut? I’ve done the pigtail trick via YouTube to trim but I’m too scared to do an actual DIY cut.
My hair isn’t long enough for the ponytail trick. To the best of my ability, once I rinsed the color out, I sectioned my hair off and pulled it to the front of my shoulders. Then, to trim the ends, I took sections and combed them between two fingers and trimmed off the bit after my fingers. Then I did the same with (more or less) symmetrical chunks of hair on each side of my face, pulling them between two fingers and trimming the ends that were sticking out beyond my fingers. It helps that my hair is fairly wavy, so it’s not so obvious if the ends aren’t perfectly even. My main mistake was not allowing quite enough for how much shorter my hair gets as it curls while drying. To check how even the chunks were, I imitated what my hairdresser does when she is cutting my hair by pulling the symmetrical chunks on each side of my face toward my jawline to check them.
Then, as my hair tends to get very full and triangular toward the bottom when it gets overgrown, I used the thinning shears to take out bulk, starting around the level of the bottom of my ears.
As for henna: I have never done it, but I poked around on a bunch of YouTube tutorials. Apparently if you have gray hair, the thing to do is do red henna first, which penetrates the grays decently well, and then do brown henna on top of that, so it grabs onto the red henna? There were a bunch of before/after shots, and it looked pretty decent, and more multidimensional that straight single-process permanent color would be.
I am somewhat inclined just to give it a shot and see what happens - I am not super happy with how the color turned out on my roots anyway (it’s too light). Am I insane?