How To Survive A Hair Disaster

My WORST Nightmare: Going From Brown to Silver Hair

You're about to read the long grueling tale of my worst hair nightmare. Prepare yourselves.
*PLEASE* learn from my mistakes.

My hair naturally is a relatively dark chestnut brown (a little lighter at the tips from previous hair-related endeavors) but, I was in the mood for a change.

Here is my natural hair:

Now, I'm no professional at the farthest stretch of the imagination but, I'd like to think I know a good amount about what I'm doing. For years I've been dying friends hair (and my own) just with what I've learned from hours spent on YouTube. 

Here's a photo of when i dyed my hair ombré between my freshman and sophomore years:

Now that you have the background story, we can get into where things went downhill.

I originally had been thinking I wanted to get wild and dye my hair a deep green, then got too scared and decided to go for another ombré but, silver this time. Here's a few more pictures of what I had in mind:

So, ready to get the silver ombré, I called up a local hair salon (I had just been in there with a friend who got her hair dyed platinum) to see how much it would cost because, to be perfectly honest, I was tired of doing my hair myself and i wanted it done perfectly. Anyways, they told me it would be about $200 and I was like "UH NO WAY!" ( In reality I was shy and told them I'd call back later to make my appointment) With hearing this news, I thought "whatever it's not like i haven't dyed my hair ombré before; I'll just do it myself."

My friend and I drove off to sally's to get the supplies I would need but, when I got there I got really reckless and thought "let's be crazy! I'll dye my whole head dark silver; It'll be cool" This is what I had in mind:

So, I grabbed two packets of this clairol bleach, purple shampoo (for keeping my hair from going yellowish in the future (told you I know what I'm doing,)) and this toner in the shade 50 cooling violet. The toner test strip in the store was a dark grey so i thought that would be perfect. The wella toner I bought was commonly used by people on YouTube to get silver hair, so I thought nothing of it. Although, most people who want the white/platinum hair look tend to go for the T18 color shade. I didn't use this shade because I didnt want my hair that light.

Fast forward to finally dying my hair; I started with the first round of bleaching. I expected to have to bleach my hair at least twice because, since I have dark hair, it would take a couple times to get it bleached to basically white. To dye hair platinum, silver, or pastel colors you HAVE to get hair bleached as light as possible NO yellow tones or else the toner or dye WILL NOT work or take to the hair. I knew this, so, I didn't think it would be a problem. 

After bleaching it the first time, here is what I had:

This was exactly what i expected, but I had already made a mistake. I started by putting bleach on my roots. DO NOT bleach your roots before you bleach the lengths of your hair. The heat from your scalp speeds up the bleach so, your roots will be MUCH lighter than the rest of your hair.

I'm so dumb for this honestly its laughable.

Back to the story, my friend and I went back to Sally's for more bleach. 

This time, Sally's was packed, so it was a get-in-and-out-as-soon-as-possible situation. I asked a girl to reach over and grab me two packets of bleach and another one of the toners (in case I ran out of the first box.) (by the way, two packs isn't enough for how much hair I have, I really had to stretch to make it cover my whole head. TIP: buy extra bleach, better to have too much.) 

This is the bleach the girl handed me

Mistake #2 the first brand of bleach had worked as expected. If the bleach you use the first time works as you planned, DO NOT CHANGE BRANDS. The bleach I used the second time was HORRIBLE. 

Mistake #3 in the car, I remembered hearing from a girl on YouTube that the brand I had didn't work for her, but to be honest, she did a lot of things wrong in her video, so I ignored the thought. always listen to your gut, if it feels wrong DON'T DO IT.

After bleaching the second time, I realized that this brand of bleach didn't change the color of my hair at all.

At this point, I was so over it.

• My hair was fried
• I didn't want to bleach it again and kill it more
• I was so tired of reaching back to put dye on my head

So, I got reckless again. 

"You know what. Let's just put in the toner and see what happens"

NO YOU IDIOT! DON'T DO THAT!

Toner will NOT take to yellow toned hair!!!!

I knew this, but did it anyway. The whole time it was in my hair, I was thinking "Oh god, this isn't going to work." After about 40 minutes, I went to wash it out. In the shower, my wet hair looked like it was actually silver!

"YES! okay, okay. Let's not get our hopes up. I have to blow dry before I know how it will look."

Three words. It. Wasn't. Silver.

Prepare yourself for what you're about to see... It may cause tears... It certainly did for me.

MY HAIR WAS NOT SILVER! I had a lovely combo of: grandma grey on top, orange in the middle, and silver/green/yellow/brown on the bottom.

It couldn't get much worse than this. After many tears, I was ready to suck it up and just go pay for it to be fixed at the salon. I slapped on the most ironic "bad hair day" hat I had, and set off. 

Once I was at the salon and told the lady my problem, she offered to do the silver for me but, I was so over it that I just wanted a natural color. Still though, I didn't want to have gone through all that for nothing so, I told her to make me a blonde. 

She went through a series of steps that I couldn't relay back to you even if I tried. She did something like, stripping out the grey, then multiple cases of toning my hair. 

This is what I have now: 

It's hard to pick up on camera but, It's sort of a strawberry blonde/brown. I plan to go back and get hightlights or just go lighter in general, once my roots grow back.

My hair was very dry from all of this to the point where I literally couldn't brush it because my hair would spring up and around. It would just get more tangled when I tried to brush it out. To fix this, I've been using this hair mask once to twice a week it's amazing out of all these products I recommend this the most, this oil in my wet ends after a shower along with any leave-in conditioner (any brand will do), and this in-shower treatment (The one I use is in pink packaging and is slightly different but, I couldn't find it online) I've also started using a Wet Brush brand brush, and I lose a lot less hair with it. 

The moral of the story is:

•  don't tone your hair unless it's white blonde first
• don't use shitty bleach
• if you are gonna get mad when things go wrong, just pay the salon to do it for you

I hope you were able to learn from my mistakes.

-Theresa