I've been coloring my hair since I was about sixteen or so, maybe even younger. I started out with kind of just highlights and then I gradually started to do more different things, like I went darker and then I went like reddish for a really long time.
Black Auburn And Blonde Chunky Highlights right before I went blonde, I hadn't colored my hair in months and so I had about maybe like four or fiveinches of virgin hair at the actual top of my head, the rest of my hair was kind of this carmel reddish brownish color, which was not my natural color, my natural color was what was on top of my head, which is kind of a, I would say maybe a level five ashy brown. If you're starting out with like darker hair or even medium dark hair, you have tounderstand that it's not going to take one bleach session to get to the color, like this color. To achieve this color, I had to bleach it a total of two times, and then I did two bleach washes, but I'll get into that in a second. And then on top of that you have to tone it, which is also a little bit more product that I'll jump into in just a sec.The greasier your hair is when you bleach your hair, the better off your hair will be simply because that extra oil and grime that kind of builds up over the days helps protect your hair shaft from the chemicals that you're about to be applying to your hair.
And I also suggest coconut oil just as an extra moisturizing step for when you're actually bleaching your hair. I read a lot online that it actually helps enhance the actual brightness and bleaching effects, but I'm not, I don't have any scientific evidence that backs that up at all. I just like using coconut oil when I bleach my hair because it helps protect the hair even more. After each bleach session that I did, I ended up wearing hair masks to bed and then waking up and rinsing it out, so several days in a row, I did that. Make sure you load up on products that are super moisturizing for your hair and I would suggest sleeping in them, like putting on a hair mask, wrapping it up in either a plastic bag or a processing cap and just going to bed with it in so it actually like has twelve-ish hours to kind of penetrate your hair that you just fried. The first bleach session I think I had waited like four or five days without shampooing my hair so my hair was pretty greasy, it was pretty grimy at the time. I went to Sally's and I got the I think it was the Ion lightener. I started out with just the packets that they have, you can get like packets of lightener. I realized a packet or two was not enough for my hair, I needed to get the entire tub. If you have hair that is at least this long, I would definitely say getting a tub because it's just.. you're going to be doing this a couple of times and it's more cost effective to get the tub than it is to get the individual packets like fifty of them. I also picked up the Wella T-18 toner and I think I actually got two of those. I got the T-18 toner but then I also got the T-11 I think, it was just a pale blonde.
I also got a big tub, like a big jug of both volume developer and thirty volume developer cause I didn't know what I was going to be using, I might as well get both, because it's really cheap, the developers are super cheap and those were also the Ion brand. Make sure you have latex gloves and a brush and a bowl that you can mix all this stuff together and then you just kind of jump in. What I did was I mixed the bleach with the developer so it was the consistency of pancake batter. That's what I read was the most effective consistency but I guess it's more of a preference thing than anything else. The drier it is, the longer it's going to take to develop and the more runny it is, it's harder to work with, but it develops a little bit faster is what I've heard, I don't know if true or not, but that's what I've heard. So I mixed it to the consistency of pancake batter and I started with a strand test, which is super important just so you know exactly how long your hair takes to develop. When you're working with bleach you want to always start from like the mid-shaft down from your hair to the very ends. You want to leave like the roots and the upper parts for last because they develop a lot faster than the stuff at the ends. I let the strand test from like the ends to the bottom, or to the mid-shaft to the bottom, Iet that sit for I think about a half an hour and then, no, I think it was more like twenty minutes and then I did the roots for another ten minutes on top of that.
And then I just shampooed it out and dried it, and the result was a little bit orange, but that's kind of exactly what you're shooting for with the first bleach session. After I knew what I was in for with the strand test, I pretty much just did my whole head. I think I started with the bottom layer first and at this point I was still using the packets and I didn't have the tub of bleach so we to like, I did the bottom half, and then we had to do like an emergency run to Sally's before it closed and got more bleach because it was really awkward just running around with like half my head bleached and the other half not bleached. After the bleach had been sitting for total, all around, about thirty to forty minutes, total, I rinsed it out, I shampooed it, and then I conditioned it. I slept in like a crazy hair mask and then that was pretty much it. I did a hair mask, I slept in a hair mask consistently for about three or four days and then I immediately bleached it again after four days had passed. You want to wait as long as possible in between bleach sessions just to kind of like give your hair a chance to breathe and give it life again, cause it takes a long time, it takes a long time to do it the "healthy" way. After those four days had passed and I slept in a hair mask for those four days, I bleached it again.
This time, I used coconut oil, I coated my hair in coconut oil and I let that sit in my hair for about three-ish hours before I bleached it, just to give it time to really penetrate my hair shaft and really get in to help moisturize and protect it. I just repeated the same process as before. I think this time I tried to do it with a twenty volume developer instead of thirty, but it just didn't lighten as much as I wanted to, so I ended up using a thirty volume developer. After I had bleached it, I shampooed it out and I didn't condition it because I was planning on toning it. I used the Wella T-18 toner with a ratio of 1:2 with the twenty volume developer that I picked up. I started with my roots and I just kind of painted it all the way down my hair. And it does turn your hair purple while it's developing but that's kind of the point because what the toners basically do is it kind of counteracts it. It's purple, so it counteracts yellow tones in your hair. And then I let that sit for about thirty minutes or so, then I rinsed it, shampooed it, and moisturized it, conditioned it, let it dry, and then I ended up trimming it a little bit because the ends were getting a little bit drier than I wanted it to be. I waited about a week or week and a half with that hair, and then I did a bleach bath. I picked up a new tub of bleach. I was using the Ion brand before but this time I heard a lot of good things about PrismLites, so I got the PrismLites bleach in "violet".
Color really doesn't make that much of a difference at all, in my experience it didn't make a difference at all. I mixed that bleach with a thirty volume developer as I did before so it was like the consistency of pancake batter, and then I mixed about double that with shampoo. I had the bleach mixture about half of the purple tub that I was using and I pretty much filled it all the way up to the top with shampoo. And if you are going to be using a shampoo, make sure the shampoo you're using is either white or like, I used a white one and I wouldn't suggest white,I would suggest a clear shampoo. If there's any sort of color to the shampoo, it has the tendency, it could possibly stain your hair that color and that's exactly what I didn't want so if you're going to be using a bleach bath, make sure you get a shampoo that's clear or white, and really white, like not, not with any tones to it, it has to be white. I used the Organix coconut milk shampoo and filled it all the way up to the top, mixed it in, and it was like the consistency of flubber, it was really weird, it was bouncy but it was really stretchy at the same time, it was so weird. The reason I did a bleach bath this time was that I heard that it was a lot more gentle because you're basically diluting the bleach down, so at this point.
I wanted to be really gentle with my hair because I didn't know, like, my hair's limit. I didn't know what I was doing and I wanted to be as gentle as I could, so I used a bleach bath, I used shampoo. You can also use conditioner but make sure your conditioner, again, is white with no tones to it otherwise it has the tendency to stain your hair. I applied the bleach bath mixture the same way I did regular bleach. I started with like mid-shaft down, let that sit for probably like twenty-ish minutes or so, and then I did my roots, I let that sit for another ten minutes and I looked like a purple monster. I rinsed it, I shampooed it and then I got out and toned it like I did before with the Wella T-18 toner. I slept in another hair mask and then I waited ten days. I did a bleach bath number two exactly like I did before. I mixed up the lightener with the developer, thirty volume developer until it was the consistency of pancake batter, I added in more shampoo until it was like flubber all over again. I let it sit on the orange-y spots in my hair. I had a couple stripes right on top of my head that were a lot darker than the rest of my hair and so I let the bleach bath sit on those pieces for ten minutes starting out. Once those ten minutes had passed, I applied it to the mid-shaft down to the ends, let that sit for twenty minutes and then for the remaining ten minutes.
I did my roots and everything closer to my head. Total, on the pieces where it sat the longest, it had been on for about forty minutes or so but most of it had been sitting for about a half an hour. After that, I rinsed it, I shampooed it and I dried it. I didn't condition it at all, and it felt so dry simply because I didn't condition it when I got out of the shower. I think the problem with the Wella toners with me was that my hair wasn't light enough when I was using them, and because of that, the toner just didn't really stick all that well in my hair, so this time I did something a little bit different. I basically got that purple tub out again, I mixed a huge amount of conditioner with three different.Manic Panic dyes, a blue one, a purple one and an actual like toner one. The conditioner was actually a yellow color and so as I said before yellow is counteracted by purple so I added a ton of conditioner that was yellow, I kind of cancelled it out with the purple dye, the Manic Panic dye, just a tiny tiny bit, and then I added a little bit too much blue dye to that, so I added more conditioner and then I added the toner, the Virgin Snow. So the conditioner mixture kind of turned into a light bluish-grey and I had probably a cup, cup and a half total of the mixture because I wanted to coat my entire head withit. I did a strand test, I did, I think it was, yeah, this piece back here, which is definitely a little bit bluish-grey now because that's where I did the strand test.
The strand test ended up being a little bit too much grey for my taste, so I added a ton of white conditioner to it, you can use any white conditioner as long as it's white. And I diluted it with that a little bit and then I applied it to the rest of my hair. And I got the color, finally, that I had wanted, which was this color, what you're seeing right now. So yesterday I slept in a deep conditioning treatment, and this is the finished result of all of that and I'm actually really happy with how it turned out all in. Considering the amount of horrible things I ended up doing to my hair, it's actually in pretty decent condition. I would have probably applied coconut oil to my entire head before I bleached it the first time. I didn't do that the first time, I did it the second time, and I think it did make a difference in the overall condition of my hair. I would not have toned it after the second time bleaching it because it didn't really do much of anything because it wasn't light enough. There is no point in toning your hair if it is not light enough. The color of your hair has to be the color of the inside of a banana, a very very very pale yellow, and at that point, then you can tone it and you should see some results. But my hair was just not light enough so toning it just kind of wasted time and I used that twenty volume developer which isn't that harsh on my hair, but considering it didn't really do much it probably, Images Of Black Auburn And Blonde Chunky Highlights I probably shouldn't have done that. I would have checked the color of the conditioner before buying it, with the Manic Panic dyes, I would have checked and made it white. Tresseme makes a cheap white conditioner that many people use, so that's something you can look into if you're wanting to do this yourself. If I could do it all over again, I would have bought a mirror, a hand mirror, because I didn't have one until the last bleach bath and it would have made my life so much easier getting the back because I was doing it all myself.
OK, now when you get to the end, and you've added in your last piece of hair, we're just going to go ahead and continue braiding it down the remainder of the hair. Now you're getting to the end, so you're going to have little pieces pop out here and there, and that's OK. Keep going as far down as we can. And then we are going to secure it with an elastic. I think we're just about there. So pick up an elastic and secure it. Now we're going to take the remainder of the braid and tuck it under the first part. So we're just going kind of lift that up, and tuck the braid underneath.We'll fix that in a minute with some bobby pins. And when you get it kind of situated, go ahead and secure it with bobby pins.
