before we get into the colors, quick detour to talk about the other chemical services pete has had on his hair. i've gone back and forth on this, but i don't think he used to relax his hair in the good old straight as fuck emo hair days. he said in this article in 2011, "the amount of maintenance that went into my [straight] hair was ridiculous" and "I want to get out of the shower and just be stoked, not think about how I don't want water to touch my hair." which would make a lot of sense if the only thing he was doing was straightening it. his side burns were always his natural texture, which they really wouldn't have been if he'd been relaxing it too. they were just too short for him to get with the flat iron. examples:

bonus picture of him straightening his hair:

that being said, i DO think he has a keratin treatment in the present day! his hair has a level of shine that i've seen in a lot of clients that have keratin, and it can be applied over processed hair without breaking it off. examples of the shine i'm talking about

there's still a little bit of wave in there when air dried, though! this is still common with chemical straightening treatments, they only relax up to 80% of the hair's natural texture, so this could easily be what it looks like if he'd just air dried and not straightened it afterwards.

okay, chemical treatment sidebar over. onto color! i can feel it in my heart that pete's hair lifts really easily. look at the ends of his hair, here. they're WHITE!

while i can't say i am intimately familiar with hairdressing in the 90s, from all the pictures of incredibly warm 90s highlights i've seen, i'm assuming toners weren't too common/nonexistent at the time. if his hair is that white without any toner, i KNOW it lifts well. i will return to the blond later, because i have a lot i want to talk about with him being blond.

man, i love pete with red hair. i will tell everyone in the world how much i do. i think all of these are semi permanent colors on top of bleach because of how vibrant they are. pete has also done that thing that every emo with naturally dark hair has done and died it Pitch Black which i fucking respect (i have done this too)

pink!!!!! i think this is an incredibly flattering color on him and it really brings out his eyes, i think he should do the pastel pink again bc it looks so fucking good on him

okay onto what made me wanna make this post! I wanna talk about pete being blond!

i can tell you with confidence that this is his hair without any toner. this looks like about 4-6 weeks of regrowth and there's some unevenness in the tone of the blond, but look at those ends! white as fuck! i really do think his hair can get to blond easily. i also think it's really funny when people call this era "lemon pete" because that's such a shady way of saying his hair looks brassy lmao, it looks different when it's toned!!

look at how gorgeous. his stylist is a saint. pete's all over bleach and tone with his long hair was so pretty but it also made me a little insane purely because of how long his roots often were, i know he's on the road a lot but i see these roots and it makes me want to cry as a stylist. it would be so hard to not get banding with roots this long.

YOU CAN SEE YOUR ROOTS FROM UNDER YOUR HAT PLEASE BOOK AN APPOINTMENT

and then one day i woke up and felt strangely at peace and it was because pete transitioned his bleach and tone into a balayage (which is much lower maintenance) this is when he first started it, i think they did some really blended highlights to start it off

it grew some more and they are definitely now doing a true balayage on him, look at how there's some blond that comes almost all the way up to the root but it's only really solidly blond at the ends. i think they also did some kind of lowlight on him based on the fact that he has no visible grays and that there's brown at the roots and also the mids but it's lighter than his natural color.

here's another good picture of what i'm talking about with the blond, it's focused at the ends only.

you can actually see the transition in this picture! I doodled on it to show you where the old bleach and tone was and where they started to blend it upwards