Adventures with Hair Dye

The box that started it all.

I'm still feeling a little under the weather. I hurt my legs a couple of days ago (sprinting is not my strong suit), and haven't been really taking care of them, so it's just gotten worse. As a result, I'm pretty much confined to the house. Thank God I have a couple of days off! Anyway, another sick day post, this time, about my roommate, Beth.

A while ago, my roommate Beth decided that her hair was not a color that she particularly enjoyed. Actually, in all the time I’ve known Beth, I’ve never seen her hair be its totally natural color. When we first met, it was a red (she’s really a brunette), and she has been dyeing it that color ever since. Anyway, she decided that she wanted to go dark brown with blue underneath in celebration of a new job she got. She set up a sort of makeshift dyeing station in the kitchen, and we really went to town.

Well, dark brown turned out to be pitch black. Uh oh. What a problem! The solution: pour red on top of it, to kind of fix the darkness of it. Well, that didn’t do much, as the photos show. So she went about her life for a week like that, with nice jet-black locks.

Black-hair Beth!

After that week, and some researching on color strippers, we decided to get some Color Oops and remove the color from her hair a little bit. We got all the way to the checkout with the color stripper when the heavily dyed cashier told us that it was just going to be a disaster. This scared Beth and I off pretty quickly, until we got home and had second thoughts. After some hurried online research, Beth decided to just do it. The problem? Sneaking past the girl who told us not to buy the color stripper in the first place! After some stealthy sneaking, we left the store, color oops in hand. Her hair would (hopefully) be dark brown this time. Hopefully.

While stripping the color, it went back to looking like this.

The color stripper left her hair the same red that it was before, which was a definite improvement over the black. Another dose of brown dye, and we were left with someone certainly more like what she was hoping for. Not quite, but a definite improvement. I suppose the lesson is to always do a strand test. Best of luck in all your dye adventures.

Fun bonus photo: Beth in the corner of shame waiting for the brown dye to develop.