I Did Something I Thought I’d Never Have The Guts To Do – I Dyed My Hair Grey!

If I had to sum myself up in one word, “brave” would not be it.

Although I am trying to change this part of me by regularly putting myself out there with new experiences or trying new things with my kids, I still can’t seem to factor any of that into my appearance.  I’m pretty sure I have looked the same since, um, high school.

For instance, I don’t wear hats.  Why?  Well even though I love them on other people, I feel like when I don a hat, I might has well be putting a traffic cone on my head.  Hats just scream “look at me – I am cool and trendy” when in fact I am the opposite.  Are traffic cones on your head trendy this season?  It seems like a Summer colour.  I don’t even know what I’m saying.

The fact is that I will be turning 29 on Friday.  I’m falling head first into my last year of my 20’s and kind of feel like it’s a now or never thing, you know?

So after making sure I knew exactly what I wanted, I made a booking with my favourite hair salon – Style Bar at Palmyra Junction.  I made it quite far in advance, so I could chicken out if I needed to, but also so that I could give myself a chance to get used to the idea that after that, I would be GREY haired.

After chatting it all over with my stylist, we started the process.  This meant covering my head in peroxide. Every last bit of my hair was covered up and then left for an hour or so for my hair to take on the colour.  Or, actually for it to turn white.  This meant wrapping it up in cling wrap to make use of the bodies natural heat to help it along.

Please excuse the poor quality here – I dropped my phone and it cracked right over my front camera – sigh.

Then we washed it out and I stared at myself in the mirror and had to cover from shock.  I had white hair.  WHITE HAIR.

Time to put in the colour which burned my scalp like crazy and had to be left on for 15 minutes-ish.

But the result.  Oh the result.

To be honest with you, I thought this would be one of those things you do and then immediately regret it.  Like that one time when I was in pre-school and my grandmother convinced me that it would be a good idea to cut my waist length, glorious blonde locks off.  Let’s just say that it was not a good idea.

Thankfully this is not like that at all!  I am so in love with my hair that I think that this might just be my new “thing”.  I just can’t get enough of it.

Here’s what you need to know about dyeing your hair grey:

• The process is not perfect – the result will be as unique as you are.
• The darker your hair, the more hectic the process is as you would probably need to do a couple of rounds of the peroxide to properly whiten your hair
• Go to a professional.  I don’t know about you, but I am not risking a home job on something as technical as this.  The horror stories I heard from my stylist about home jobs that they had to fix was enough to put me off that for life.
• You need to purchase a silver hair shampoo to maintain the colour as it will slowly wash out depending on how porous your hair is.

And now I feel the need to do another shoot – thankfully I’ve booked with the Nestling girls for a couple of weekends time when they are here in Cape Town.

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