Hair Time.

I am in the process of bleaching my hair platinum blonde...again. I am making a video of it this time because I can't even count how many times people would ask how I bleached it. The problem is, everybody's hair is different and I am not a professional. So literally I am just showing people what happened to MY hair when I used the things I used.

Hair bleaching at home is like a giant experiment. If you aren't prepared for damaged hair or prepared to have accidents, you should just stay away from bleach or go a to a salon. The reason I don't go to salon's is because every...single...time...I was told it couldn't be done or that it would be too damaging.

I really don't care about damage. My hair has been in pretty bad shape before.So bad that it felt like stretchy rubber when wet, but I just let it be, didn't brush it, wasn't rough with it, and was extreeemly careful with it. And guess what, here I am still with a full head of healthy hair. I just let my hair do it's natural thing and it bounced back into health. (Later I learned, while watching a video of an actual professional doing hair, that your hairs cuticle will heal itself in 36 hours. If that's the case then I am perfect! HAHA JK, but really, when my hair got as bad is it had been I just let it sit and after a while it was normal!)

Besides that, I am fully prepared to shave my head or chop it all off. If I ever get too carried away, I don't mind getting rid of my hair. I have done it before. During that time is actually when I first started researching hair bleaching. I had buzzed hair and was waiting for it to grow to the point that I could buy extensions and go blonde. So I literally had a year to Google and YouTube different ways to bleach my hair. The conclusion? Bleach to a pale yellow and tone with a purple shampoo/conditioner.

I don't think I will ever have to chop my hair off. My hair is beast and takes VERY well to bleach. The first step I did this time was a bleach bath with my favorite bleach, Clairol Born Blonde Maxi. My mom had a box leftover from when I did a bleach bath on hers. (Well the other half of the box.) 

For my bleach baths I mix up half of the contents in the box as directed, then add a bit of warm water. I don't have any specific amount, I just add whatever I feel is enough to cover my head. I mix well and slap it on. In this case, the reason I made one is because my hair was three different colors.

First, I had about an inch of roots. (My natural dark ash brown.) Second, below that, I had about an inch of a more reddish brown. (This is because when I dyed my hair mermaid red I didn't feel like bleaching my roots and just slapped on the semi-permanent red over it and it just stained. After covering that with a brown dye, the red color just got pushed further and further into my hair or something...I'm just too lazy to do things the right way:P ) Third was the rest of my hair which is where all of the previous bleaching was done and where my hair was the most damaged. I had dyed over it twice with a dark brown color. I always learned from other people that dying your hair dark is harder to remove so I used the bleach bath on just this section of my hair. Little did I know that my hair would completely lift. It was actually a very pretty blonde and wasn't too brassy from the bleaching.


So after this I let my hair sit for a day and then decided I should attempt to even it out. I applied another box of bleach to the roots (both the reddish and my virgin roots), left it on for about 20 minutes, then added it to the rest of my hair for another 20. Afterwards I showered with a cheap purple shampoo I found at Walmart.

I should have done that step differently, but it's all good. Where my hair was red came out a more brassy color, my natural roots came out a bright brass yellow, and the rest of it just lightened a little more. So I decided to strand test a bit of homemade toning conditioner.

I had some leftover Ion Color Brilliance Brights purple semi-permanent dye that I mixed with conditioner to tone my moms hair. I then mixed it again with MORE conditioner to use on my hair. So basically a large glob of conditioner and a dab of purple dye. (If you are attempting to tone your hair I strongly suggest a strand test first. ESPECIALLY if you DON'T want the ever popular lavender/silver hair.) The strand test on my hair hardly did anything, but the test i did on one of my extension pieces came out a nasty silver purple with a tint of green. I knew this semi-permanent color was nasty, but had no idea it was that gross. 

At this point I just wanted it to match my extensions so I could tone everything to white. So after another day, I bleached again. This time I applied to the "red" parts first for about 10 minutes, then to my roots for another 10 minutes, the applied more for 10, then used any leftover for the rest of my hair and just watched it until I thought I should rinse. After this it came out a much paler yellow and was much more blended. The different shades were much less noticeable, but at this point it's something that doesn't bother me and people most likely wont even notice. (Except all of you...because I just told you about it.)

On to the toning conditioner!!
This is where things get difficult. I literally attempted to tone my hair twice and used just about an entire bottle of the Ion color Solutions purple conditioner.  After applying it liberally,

twice, it just barely made it a less neon yellow. Not what I wanted. So my next plan was to either buy an actual blonde dye and hope it changed something or buy another bleach and hope it made it even lighter so I could tone again and reach the silvery white I wanted. Sad for me I wasn't able to get to the store to look at different dyes so I just asked Wesley to pick me up another box of bleach and another bottle of purple conditioner.

So i applied half the box of bleach to just the darkest parts of my hair. It made it a bit lighter and I toned it AGAIN. This time

I left it on for a long time and it finally worked! (The photo shows how light the ends of my hair got compared to my roots which is why I only have it on my roots and just wiped it down the ends:P )My hair came out a much lighter, silvery, pale yellow, whiteness. 

My roots took much more to the purple so they were more silver than the rest of my hair. It's hard to tell in the photo because my hair isn't down, but my roots are really silver and the lengths are more whitish yellow.














Now for the final product. I finished toning my hair extensions using the same conditioner and they blended perfectly:D