THE BLEACH DISASTER THAT STOPPED ME DYEING MY HAIR

/in /by

When my shampoo-free hair got plastered all over the Daily Mail, the reaction was mixed to say the least.

One of the comments that really made me laugh was that I don’t use shampoo but I’m happy to bleach my hair.

Heh.

Sorry, but I haven’t dyed my hair since 2011.

So I thought I’d quickly share with you some of the awful colours I’ve dyed my hair over the years and explain why I stopped dyeing it years before I ever decided to stop using shampoo.

I started meddling with my natural hair colour when my best friend and I got our mitts on some sachets of toner at the age of 12, and it only escalated from there.

Whether my hair colour came from a box or a salon, over the years I’ve been ginger, brunette, white blonde, yellow blonde, plum, pink, purple and black.

I’d asked a salon to bring my then-reddish hair back up to my natural colour, and over the course of three hours and two rounds of bleach this is what they reckoned was passable as “natural”.

Holy f***ing s***, right?

Brittle, breaking and porous, I was devastated when the ends turned green whenever I went swimming, as you can see above.

So I sought out a new salon and bit by bit I had the colours toned down – and the length taken up:

By May 2011 I ended up with an inverted bob with the intention of starting completely from scratch.

I know, I’m pretty ruthless.

I hadn’t had short hair in about a decade, and even though I had my good days with it the short hair was a pain to style and I was determined to get my long hair back.

The layers and layers of bleach had pretty much grown out when I gave into temptation and dyed it one last ever time, but the crazy purple color faded within a few months so meh, no harm was done:

I know, some of the later photos look like I have highlights – what can I say, if you don’t believe it’s my natural colour I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.

So yeah, that’s why I don’t dye my hair anymore – I learned the hard way that the only way to undo years of damage is to grit your teeth and grow the dead hair out naturally.

I’m not going to lie, it really, really sucked at the time, but I’ve finally gone from saying “It’s still not long enough” to being 100% happy with my natural hair colour and 99% happy with the length 😉

Never mind avoiding all the horrid chemicals that are lurking in your hair dye, the best part for me about not dyeing my hair anymore – besides having a healthy head of hair – is that I save a hell of a lot of money and time by not having to do my roots every six weeks, and all it took was a few years of patience.

Ta daaaa?