I'm totally deviating from nail polish in this post to talk about my hair. I started putting highlights in my hair when I started my freshman year of high school. My hair dresser started cutting my hair when I was 3, despite a few years of not seeing me when I moved out of state. I trusted her completely with my hair, and so she put in some cap highlights in a pretty light brown color. From there, I just started playing a bit. In my junior year, I went for red highlights, which I LOVED and on my graduation of college, I went for RED hair. The salon I was going to, specifically used Redken products [official website].
College was the time of experimenting. On top of going to the salon to get red and blonde highlights (including one "omg" moment when my hair turned out orange and blonde - not sure what happened there), I started playing with box dye too. My favorite was Clairol "Herbal Essences" in Cinnamon Stick, which was a Medium Warm Brown.
In 2005, I started to shake things up a bit, by going BLACK. So there is a story here. I was a radio station DJ, and every year on "Dead Day" (the day before finals start), we held a concert for the University. This year, my friends and I decided to dye our hair... me with black, Al with red, and Sonny was going blue. We show up at the concert, and I was the only who went through with it.
Pretty much after this, I quit playing with my hair for about 3 years, and just let it grew out. 2008 was the year of "fun". First I tried to give myself highlights from a box with a wand and ended up with this.
I also went red
And did red highlights
Then I quit playing again.
Well, this year I decided it was time to play again. First I went and dyed my hair dark and got bangs.
Then last week I decided I wanted to go purple. Now, purple is not a very easy color to achieve, and I wasn't about to do it myself. I was really excited to let my new hair salon and stylist play with me, and even though I fretted about it for days, I figured it was enough fretting - this is just hair! Look at how much I've abused it already!
The salon I go to now, Bella Bella [official website] uses Goldwell, and this process is called Elumen [official website]. The best thing was that it DID NOT SMELL BAD. In fact, they make it a point to have GOOD smelling products. Um, yay! I wanted violet peek a boo highlights, so first, we took up one layer of hair and put it to the side and started the foiling off of my section to be bleached. I did the "10 foil" method which meant I had 10 foils on each side. Now, we were lucky, and my hair took to the bleach very well - we got a "10" on the lifting scale and I was left with some BLONDE hair.
But surprise!!!!
I can totally hide it too.
I'm super happy with it. This salon also told me stuff that I didn't know, like that moisture is HORRIBLE for hair dye. So now when I get out of the shower, I quickly go dry my hair. I also use the Elumen shampoo and conditioner only, so that helps too. I'm super happy with it, and it's so striking. These pictures were taken about a week later, so you can see that the color is still super vibrant. This color should last 4-6 weeks before fading to a lighter purple, at which point I'll see where I want to go from there. This isn't very cheap though - for the bleaching and coloring of 10 foils was $190, but again I'm very happy with it.
More nail polish coming tomorrow. ^_^
