Minor Hair Fiasco

Okay, so it is bound to happen at some point when you take dyeing your hair into your own hands. This is actually probably the second time I would count it as a 'hair fiasco.' The first time was when I was 17, my senior year of high school, right after my parents moved to Korea, when I dyed my hair blue. No, the blue hair wasn't the fiasco; that worked out about like it was intended. A couple weeks before going to visit them in Korea for Christmas though, I tried to get my hair back to normal, which at the time was a medium blonde. I bought some sort of hair bleach and managed to turn my hair snot green. I tried again, no luck. I started to panic about a week before I was to see my parents, so I went into a salon. They did a test on a lock of my hair and found that, because of the metallics in the blue Punky Colour dye, their product managed to eat right through my hair. So, they wished me luck and sent me on my way. I decided to make a final stab at some shade of blonde, bought some light to medium blonde dye at the store, and tried it out. About an hour later, I no longer had glowing hair, but a pretty shade of blonde, albeit lighter than normal. My parents were none-the-wiser to the fiasco when I went to see them. My mom actually asked if I lightened my hair and said it looked nice (later, she found out why I had the panicked look on my face when she asked me). The news finally came out at high school graduation when Mr. McGeachy (perhaps my most favorite teacher at Camas High) was making 'predictions' and said that I would "become a L'Oreal hair color chemist specializing in primary colors." I fessed up to my parents right after the ceremony and we all laughed about it (whew!). So, you would think at 26 I would have learned to avoid potential hair fiascos and seek the help of a professional (I did for a while, but my professional/ cousin Jessi moved away to Montana and is no longer in the business). Apparently not. Here's the story. Most recently, I have been dyeing my hair kind of a red-auburn. The color looks nice I think. We were out one night and my roots were bugging me, so I bought some more dye, though not the one I usually get because the store we were at didn't have the right kind. I figured it would be okay since the colors on the box looked basically the same. My hair, however, turned out much more like the name (something like radically ruby red) than the color on the box. This isn't the fiasco. The color looked pretty good, but it was much more red than I had anticipated (you can kind of see it in the pics from Daniel's birthday). That was about a month ago. I was hoping that the color would fade some (I don't want to look like I use Kool-Aid for hair dye when I go in for interviews!), but it really hasn't. So, I decided to buy some dye remover on Saturday and strip my hair, then re-dye it to a shade slightly darker than my natural color (which I think is sort of a dark blonde to light brown), thus begins the fiasco. The dye remover/ bleach ran out about 3/4 of the way through my hair. While I waited for it to process and then rinsed it out, Daniel made a middle of the night run to the store to grab some more. Too tired to do it when he got home, we slept for a few hours. When we got up, we decided to finish, trying to use the same thickness for consistency and leaving it on for the same amount of time. Of course that couldn't work out right. That quarter of my hair ended up much lighter than the rest and was almost white. The rest of my hair had varying shades of light blond to dark blond to orange to red. I couldn't do much else to it (for fear of completely destroying my hair or making it fall out) and refused to go out in public looking the way I did. So on Sunday, Daniel helped me to color my hair. In all the time that I have been coloring my hair, I have never needed more than one box/ bottle of product. And my hair is several inched shorter now than it was for the previous 2 years of dyeing it. But apparently this time it was different. We ran out of dye just before finishing. There wasn't time to go get more to put on, so we even went as far as cutting the bottle open and scraping out every last bit. My hair definitely wasn't 'saturated' as the directions said, but I thought we did a pretty good job getting it mostly even. I let the color take and then rinsed it out, then applied the highlighting cream, hoping that some variation may make it look better. I timed it, rinsed it out, then gave my hair some much needed conditioning. My hair was still wet when I finally went to bed, so I couldn't tell how it was going to look. As it stands now, I think I must have about at least 5 distinctly different colors in my hair now. It looks a little funky. I've got blonde, orange, red/auburn, ash, and brown, not to mention the variations within each of those colors. I think when I wake up, I will actually style my hair as normal to see just how bad it looks. I'm thinking I might need to wait a week or so and do some deep conditioning in the mean time before I do anything about it. It really looked much better in my mind. Daniel understands why my last visit to a professional (at Dosha in NW Portland) cost me nearly $200. And he has also said that we will not be doing this again, therefore I can seek the help of a professional with no complaints about how much I am spending for vanity. I hope this all works itself out in the next week or so and that I still have hair. Time will tell I suppose...