So, you’ve decided to dye your hair a “crazy,” unnatural colour. One that’s vibrant and bright, just like your inspiration. Whether that inspiration comes to you from anime, pop culture, your own creative genius self, or some other place, you want your colour to be a success. From dying one streak purple to your entire head you want the results to be good, no streaky, patchy, faded colour. Sounds hard doesn’t it?
I’m here to tell you its not; unnatural hair-colour is pretty simple, and not much more difficult to keep then say brown hair would be, if you know how to do properly take care of it. For over a year I have been dying my hair bright, vibrant unnatural hues and all kinds of people ask me, how do I do it? How does it look so good? And how do I get it to last so long? The answers are simple, and throughout this post “mini-series” (as I clearly have way too much to say on this subject) I will explain all of what I think you need to know and do to get hair like mine.
The first thing you need to do is pretty simple; pick a colour. Personally, my hair is currently my favourite colour. Don’t worry about your colour being hard to find, all colours of the rainbow are easy options.
Now, its pretty clear that no one is going to believe your colour is natural. However, you still want to pick a colour that compliments your skin tone and that looks good on you. For example, bright orange or yellow hair I would never do, because my skin is yellow-based, these colours make me look like a big piece of citrus fruit. Try painting your nails the colour your thinking of, or try on a shirt that colour at the mall (I actually put a turquoise shirt on my head to see how it’d look, I mean hey, no one can see you in the change room). If your happy with it, go for it! If not it might be back to the drawing board.
Think of your hair as a piece of paper. Your dye is a crayon. You can’t colour brown paper pink now can you? Time to get your hair stripped (if you have a previous colour; like when I changed my hair-colour from red to blue), bleached (if you have a naturally dark colour), or mildly processed (for if you have fair hair, this needs to be done to open the cuticle so the colour can go in, but we’ll talk about that later). I’d recommend getting this professionally done, to preserve the health of your hair. Trust me, its worth the price to avoid frying your hair like an ant under a magnifying glass (yuck!). You’ll find your colour fades much faster if you fry your hair. It’s like the three bears’ porridge; your hair can’t be too dark, and the cuticle must be opened just right!