Hair obsession!

So, I have been pretty obsessed with hair colour recently, so much so that I made a 'hair inspiration' folder of pictures on my phone and had been showing it to pretty much anyone that would look at it.
I have naturally fairly dark brown hair but have been getting highlights since I was 12 (I'm now 21) so can't realllly remember what my natural hair colour looks like.
After years and years of wanting to be blonder and blonder I finally reached the point where enough was enough, my hair had started to look really brassy, patchy and dry and my roots were constantly on show. I had had so many highlights packed in so tightly that my roots came through as pretty much a block line. (This wasn't helped by the fact that 8 months ago I decided to get a scalp bleach rather than highlights- absolute worst decision ever!!!)

As you can see, I had a go at multi-coloured dip dying (which I do actually still like) and had a full fringe cut in at one point, but the whole time my hair was all over bleach blonde. I did like my hair at some of these points but, being a poor student, I couldn't afford to carry on having a full head of highlights done every time and was fed up of the bright blonde look.

So, I was constantly on the look out for photos of how I wanted my hair that I could show to the hairdressers (not having a regular hairdresser made this whole process even more difficult!).

I toyed with the idea of going completely dark brown, a la Kourtney Kardashian!

But I thought this might be a bit of a drastic change and had also been advised against this by friends and hairdressers.

Then, I started coming across pictures of browny, blondey, natural looking hair that I thought would be the perfect in-betweeny colour for me, I also thought this would be easier to achieve than any other kind of colour.

Here are some of the pictures from my 'Hair Inspiration' folder!-

 

I'm sure you get the idea of what I was going for now! 

Anyway, so next I went to the hairdressers with my folder of pictures hoping that they'd say how wonderful my idea was and how this would be so simple to do to my hair etc etc. As you can probably guess, this isn't the answer I got! 

I was told that because my hair had been so bleached in the past that nothing would really change the colour of it and that my only option to get to the kind of colour I wanted was to go through the process of having highlights and lowlights and letting my hair grow until the highlights and lowlights were all you could see.. I reluctantly agreed to this as the other option I was given was to dye my hair red and then brown! I have never ever wanted red hair and was told that this method would give me an orangey, brown colour and this was definitely not something I wanted.

On the day of going to the hairdressers I had a different colourist to the one I had originally spoken to and after showing her my collection of pictures she gave me my options;

I could either go with the original idea of boring highlights or now for the option I went for..

I had a whole head of highlights with a bleach and a creamier blonde colour, then all of the bits that weren't in the foils were dyed bright orange(!) then tinted brown.

The whole orange dye part of this process was pretty terrifying, the bowl was filled with a carrot/tomato soup coloured mixture that was being painted on to stands of my white hair, it's fair to say my heart was racing at this point!

After this had been on for while I was taken over to the sinks and the orange was washed out and covered with a brown tint and my foils were taken out. 

I had a lovely treatment put on my hair and was put under the heat for a little longer so still couldn't really see my hair colour (the tension really was killing me!- so far I'd been there for about 2.5 hours!)

Once I was taken to have my hair cut I was pleasantly surprised to see how dark my hair had gone as really I was originally expecting to dissapointly leave with a hair colour pretty much the same as when I'd walked in!

I don't have too many pictures of the finished result but here are a couple;

They had to take quite a bit of length off of my ends because they were so split and dry, but now my hair feels and looks so much thicker so it was worth it.

I really love my new hair colour and wish I'd done it sooner!! I have been told I need to get some good colour protecting shampoo to keep the brown from fading and was recommended Wella SP Colour Save which I've found on eBay for much cheaper than advertised in the salon.

Sorry if I rambled on a bit too long in the post but I literally could talk for days about hair at the moment!

I wasn't aware of the options I had with colouring my hair at its bleach blonde stage and had almost begun to accept that I'd have to have hair I didn't really like for the foreseeable future so I hope this may help anyone that is in the same situation as I was! The change really wasn't as scary as I'd expected either and I really am so happy with my new colour!