#ilyeelf

Gah, is there some easy way to do tumblr comment reply posts? If so I've forgotten it and failed to refind it!

galadhir replied to your photoset: So here’s me having to attend a tutorial yesterday...

It doesn’t look particularly orange in the pictures to me. But you can get colour remover at Boots now which acts like a fairly gentle bleach and would fade the orange enough for you to try the blonde again

Yeah, I’m not convinced my phone’s selfie cam accurately captured the full orange experience – I suspect its auto white balance errs a bit on the blue side of reality. On the other hand, could be I’m just a little in shock because this now is the lightest and brightest my hair has ever been in my entire life since early childhood… It’s mostly been jet black.

I’ve tried a couple of these colour remover kits on my hair a few years ago (the occasion then was a dark purplish/burgundy home dye disaster) – one was called Colour B4 and I forget the other – but they didn’t work at all on my hair. I think they’re designed for people who dye their naturally lightish-coloured (light brown or blonde) hair darker and regret it, whereas the natural colour of my hair is dark ash brown with around 30-40% grey in streaks through it, and anyway if you need to revert to a dark natural colour there’s always the simple option of dyeing over a lighter colour. Also I suspect that, like most DIY hair dyes and related products available here, they’re designed for typically fine Northern European hair, while my hair is part Afro due to mixed race ancestry and therefore much coarser. That’s probably also why even “ash blonde” dyes turn out orange/ginger on me – the bleach in them just isn’t strong enough to lighten my hair, and would likely damage most people’s hair if it was. Maybe if I really want to get to true light ash brown/dark ash blonde hair I’ll need to used a high strength bleach to take it to brassy yellow, then dye over or tone it with something very grey-purple, but that’s probably more effort and money than I’m up for at the moment.

ilye-elf replied to your photoset: So here’s me having to attend a tutorial yesterday...

Most important question is what did you dye it with?

ilye-elf replied to your post: Replies

Okay, so I don’t think you’ve used anything that will react with bleach and turn green (some red dyes do!) but I’d recommend testing anything on some hair from your hairbrush first!

You’ve got a couple of options. I’ve never tried this method myself, but I’ve heard that anti-dandruff shampoo - the stronger the better, think T-gel if you can - can lift colour, but you have to let it sit for 30 mins at a time and have a couple of goes at it. The closer you can do it to the dyeing incident, the better.

There is also something known as the Vitamin C method. Again, haven’t tried this one myself but there’s more evidence for it than the anti-dandruff method: bellatory.com/hair/Re…

Tbh I would either go to my local pharmacist and ask what they recommend (they’re literally trained in all this chemical science shit), or try one of these things from Boots. 1 is likely to lift, but not give you such strong shade removal: boots.com/bleach-… - and 2 you’ll have to use it like a semi-permanent boots.com/bleach-…

First off, thanks for all these ideas!

Hee, a greenish tinge to my hair could be exactly what it needs to cancel out the orange, LOL. But I do now vaguely remember managing to remove at least some unwanted dye colour from my hair in the past by putting olive oil through it, leaving it in overnight, and then washing the oil out with Fairy liquid. I already have both Fairy liquid and, I think, some left-over supposedly "stripping" shampoo somewhere in the house, so I think I'll try this method first. So long as I condition my hair thoroughly afterwards, at least it shouldn't do any harm.

I'd never heard of the Vitamin C method before. I guess Vitamin C is quite strongly acidic? - like lemon juice, which is supposed to work as a natural bleach/lightener on fair hair, although I've never tried that either. So I don't know about this one, but I'm not ruling it out. My hair's quite tough and can handle a lot of harsh treatment, and because I'm not overly perturbed if I have to go around looking slightly more freakish than usual for a while, I'm game to experiment.

I haven't had success with any purchased colour removing kits in the past and I've tried a few, though not the specific one you linked. I'd try the grey/silver/purplish toners more readily because I haven't used any of those before - I suspect they're more designed to make genuinely blonde hair less yellow and more ashy or platinum, so I don't imagine they'd be strong enough to have a big impact on my darker orange hair, but I think I'd be satisfied even if they only took the edge off the orange and toned it down a little bit.