Oops. I did it again.

And by “it”, I don’t mean started singing along to a Britney Spears song. By “it” I mean cut my own hair.

I. Will. NEVER. Learn.

It was *almost* okay this time. A snip & a chop & the split-ends were gone, hair was lighter, all was well with the world.

But I couldn’t leave well enough alone. Snip, snip, chop, chop, HACK, HACK.

I officially can’t stop cutting my own hair until it’s too late. Until I look in the mirror & swear. My heart beats faster I start to sweat. THAT’S when I put the frikking scissors down.

Mellow Yellow.

Yesterday I decided I wanted to dye my hair pink. I can’t tell you how I came to this decision – it seemed to just appear out of thin air. I don’t even particularly like pink. Anywho, I was trawling eBay for cheap Fudge, for when I was 16 & dying my hair “crazy” shades of blue & green, Fudge was where it was at.

In my travels I came across another brand of hair colour that I’d not seen before; Manic Panic. It seems this brand is supposed to last a bit longer than Fudge, and has a much larger array of colours – I think poor ol’Fudge paintbox colours have gone down in popularity since their heyday in the nineties – they don’t even HAVE green anymore…!

I also found another brand, Special Effects, that is supposed to last longer than  Fudge & Manic Panic put together…! Because I was suffering from information overload & a little too many options (like milk; full fat? Half fat? No fat? Skim….?), I decided to give up for the time being & come back to it later – then I remembered the Fudge I had bought at an oppy in Melbourne before we moved here – Mellow Yellow. When I bought it, it was from it’s original point of sale box, the colour had been discontinued obviously & the salon had given it to the opshop. I bought it “just because” and it’s been carted around in boxes since.

After rummaging around in the shed I came up with a tube & decided “What the hell” & did it.

Just the smell of it when I opened the tube took me back 12 years to standing in my Mum’s bathroom with an old towel & a roll of gladwrap at the ready.

 

I like it (…for a discontinued possibly out of date colour)! I am definitely going to try pink – and although I’d be interested in trying those other brands, seems they require some pretty heavy duty bleaching beforehand (which is kind of funny – semi permanent colour over rather permanent bleach), where as you can quite happily slap Fudge on without that rather drastic step.

I feel like I have doll’s hair! And I am suprised when my fringe flops in front of my eyes! Now I can worry about whether it’ll wash out before my driving test… although, as I was saying to a friend yesterday, it may very well guarantee a pass if my hair looks dodgey!

DIY Make-Over. Sort Of.

In the spirit of handmade/DIY, last night, I cut & coloured my own hair.

I think that there may be a lot of advocates of DIY out there that would absolutely draw the line at this (the cutting, not necessarily the dying), but it kind of happened by accident, and turned out okay, so I'm happy.

I meant to just give my fringe a bit of a trim, as I have been doing, with a technique that I saw on tellie years & years & years ago on that bastion of respectable and informative television... Ricki Lake. The idea is you gather up your fringe so that the base, or roots of your fringe, form a triangle, then twist it around & CHOP! This results in a kind of choppy, layered look.

Well, I did this, kind of half arsed, not even bothering with the whole triangle thing, & ended up with an incredibly short fringe that just looked... wrong. So, I gathered up the rest of my hair & did the same sort of thing... a chop here, a snip there, until I ended up in a happier place.

Here I should probably let it be known that I am not a hairdresser, and have no experience or aspirations in the field... which I think you may agree is glaringly obvious...!

So there I was, with a sink full of hair & a completely new hairstyle, and, luckily, I kinda liked it, but I was kind of shocked by the colour of the hair languishing in the basin. It was dark. Really dark. Like, dark brown dark.

For someone that considers themselves to be a natural blonde, this can be quite distressing! I decided that I'd dye my hair too, while I was on a roll.

I've only ever dyed my hair with temporary colours, you know, like blue fudge or something else that is gone in 8 washes, and none of that since I was even in high school, so it is fair to say that I was pretty nervous hiding out in the bathroom with my disturbingly close to cat-urine smelling pack of hair 'solution', but, good girl that I am, I followed the directions to the letter & ended up with hair the colour I always thought it had been, nice & light, bright, and ready, oh-so-ready, for spring.