Dye: An Adventure

So.

I had a birthday this past week. 24!

I got some birthday money from my grandma and grandpa (there'll be a post about that) so I decided to treat myself to something fun. I've been wanting to do something cool with my hair for a while but have either been broke or too busy.

Whenever I want to get something done I go to the beauty school. It's cheaper, and the instructors are there every step of the way so you know that even if there's a mistake it will be fixed.

Which I experienced firsthand.

So last time I dyed my hair (September) I had a lighter brown on top and a much darker brown on the underside and I loved it. It was the perfect color combination for my complexion and added depth to my own, boring, mousy brown color.

So this time I decided to do the same colors but add a little zest: hot pink peekaboo panels!

I went in and my stylist's name was Amanda. Let me just say that through this entire thing she was awesome.

So I told her what I wanted and she whipped out the color book and we decided on what colors to do and everything. Then she went to get the supervisor to ok the formulas.

Now, they kept the formulas from last time on file. And they worked perfectly last time. So you would think that they would use them again. But this instructor, RUTH, was an absolute moron and told them "No, you should use this developer instead of the other one" and when they took the dye off the top my roots were ORANGE. Not like, redhead orange, but orange like the Jayne hat I made earlier.

So, at this point they had bleached the panels to put in the pink, so they decided that they would put in the pink and then re-dye the roots with the correct developer this time and fix it. So, they went back to mix the colors and they came back out...they had failed to check to make sure they still had pink. Yep, they didn't.

So, out came the color book again, and we looked at all our options, and I was very disappointed because um, hello, pink is my favorite color. But, it was already bleached and ready to go, so I just chose to do fire engine red instead. Red tends to fade more quickly than most other colors, so I figured once it faded I could reapply pink and my stylist said she would help me get a hold of the right kind of dye later, and what the heck, red is fun too.

So they put the red on and then reapplied the new, correct, dye to the roots on top. We let it process and then went to rinse it out. Immediately we could see that the red was PERFECT AND AWESOME AND WOW COOL! However...my roots were still orange. Very very orange.

So, we called yet another instructor over (we'd gone through like three) and they decided on another formula to mix up to try to fix it again. So we applied that and waited...and they were still orange.

So, another instructor came over and pow-wowed with the other one, and came up with another formula, and they put it on, and while we waited for that I put in a formal complaint to the manager that it was, in fact, an instructor that made the wrong formula in the very beginning, and she should have known better. Oh, and she was really rude to me too and that bugged me.

So then we rinsed that off and it was wet but it looked better, so we dried it...and that took a long time because my hair is very thick.

But, once it was dry, the roots were almost exactly the same color as the rest! WIN!

So anyway. That was fun. I got there at 3:45 and was there until 9:45...6 hours. But it was fun, and I was in a good mood.

My attitude was basically this: that's what you risk when you go to the beauty school to get your hair done. Someone is bound to make a mistake somewhere and as long as they are willing to fix it, I'm cool with it. The only reason I was pissed off was because it was the freaking instructor that messed it all up.

So here's a picture of the back...it's really messy because I slept on it but you can see the red peeking through. It's all around, like a halo, and when I move you can see it peek through and I LOVE IT and it actually looks redder than this:

SO rock and roll.

Anyway. So I got birthday money and I was going to have fun with it and I knew this was going to be expensive. The instructor at the beginning was going to charge me $20 for the base color, and another $6 for adding another color to the underside, and then she wanted to charge $3 per panel, and they ended up putting in 20 panels (there's a lot more red in there than it looks like in that picture) and so it was going to be about $90. And that was fine with me, because it was birthday money. BUT, when the stylist sent me up to the register to pay she wrote down that there were only 5 panels (yay! saving money!) so that was going to be only about $40. AWESOME. So I brought the formula slip up to the register and they were like "$14 please" and I was like, "Um, you didn't look at the slip, I had panels and everything" and they were like "Yeah (sneaky looks on their faces) we're having a special". The instructor that had priced it out earlier was gone so they were able to fudge it and I had like $100 worth of work done for $14.

And that's the story about my birthday hair dye.