Hair Diaries | Nigar | Bleaching my Hair

This is such an overdue post its almost a sin. 

Nearly 6 months ago I bleached the life out of my hair so I could dye it and get lovely mermaid hair. While my update post that I did back in June mentions the stuff I used and the process, I will be going into more detail here, as well as showing you my in-between hair where I looked like an anime character. 

To start off with.

I had ombre Hair. So the ends where already bleached and blonde. 

I had read that coconut oil is supposed to protect the hair from the bleach so I saturated my hair in coconut oil on the Friday, let it sit over night, and commenced bleaching the next day. We'd bought Tigi True Light Bleaching Power and Activator that we'd read about on Halima from Fashionicide's blog. It took about a week to come after buying it from Amazon as it is a professional product and you can get anything on Amazon. 

First day of Bleaching

So I woke up on Saturday all geared to go with my oily hair. We went outside and started mixing the powder and activator. This was when Kayennat asked me if I was sure I wanted to do this all over and not start lower down and work my way up from an ombre to a full head of dye. Looking back, this is what I should have done, but I never do anything in halves and thought I'll just go all out. So ahead we went. We lost these pictures as Kayennat's Laptop is a blackhole for pictures and we've misplaced that particular SD card, so you'll have to deal with the pictures from my phone!

Thankfully it was a warm day and we could do this outside. After about 45 minutes I went and washed it. Dried it. And did another layer of bleach. This happened one more time before we decided we had to stop. At this point I thought it would be fine to go ahead and apply the pink Directions dye that I had bought, but alas it didn't take as the hair was still too yellow. Below is the yellow hair in all its glory. 

During the week

This week was such a nightmare. On the Sunday I had a birthday party, and during the week I had to go out at least 3 times! I dealt with it and worked it instead of hiding it, but its defo not a stage I wanna be back at.

The condition of the hair at this point was still pretty good. All things considered. We'd gotten some help from Halima and she told us to buy the Wella Color Charm Toner in T18 - Lightest Ash Blonde, which we got from Ebay. Whilst waiting for this to arrive, I decided to tone my hair using purple shampoo, which is something I swore by when I had my ombre hair, post here, and had in abundance as home. I slathered it on dry hair, realised it needed wet hair, so I added water in and let it sit for a couple of hours. 

As you can see, the purple shampoo worked really well! Lets forget about the patchiness, it toned down the yellow and even went lilac in some places. Not bad at all.

Second day of bleaching & Toner & Dyeing

This where is the shit went downhill. I've gone into all the detail on the hair update I posted before and I'm really just about to repeat myself, so if you've read it you can skip ahead. 

We'd run out of the Tigi powder. I had ordered some more but it didn't arrive on time, and as Kayennat was working in Wales during the week at that time, and I was set to move out to Manchester at anytime, I thought I just had to get it done on the weekend after my first 3 bleachings. So I bought 2 boxes of Bleach London Bleaching kits, and went home and got Kay to bleach it. We ran out of bleach and had to use a third box, which was the L'Oreal Preference Absolute Platinum in Extreme Platinum. I had also not saturated my hair in coconut oil over night like before, instead doing it for only a couple of hours and even then, it wasn't saturated. 

I left the bleach on too long. Too long, that it was steaming. Because I was painting my nails and forgot about the time. Shit went down and my hair was dead. I was terrified of drying it. 

On still wet hair, I toned it using the Wella toner, and used a mixture of Pravana Pink with a bit of Wild Orchid, but with all my hair we ran out after doing the underneath layers of my hair. We did the rest with Directions Lilac which thankfully I had bought beforehand! 

So here we have the colouring process (Saturday), what it looked like straight after, in bad light of course, and the day after in sun light (Sunday), and then the day after that, so the Monday. I checked the dates of all these pictures! Like I said above, I was terrified of drying my hair so I had gone to sleep with it wet. Eventually I couldn't handle it anymore mid night and had to dry it a little it. Next day I slathered oil on it and let it sit. Thankfully it was a little bit better the next day, but the damage had been done.

This is what my hair looked like 3 days after all that drama! It looks so good and healthy in this picture, but looks can be deceiving. 

I think that's it for this post. I'll have one out with the topping up of colours and the products I swore by while trying to regain my hairs strength.