A (condensed) History of Hair

I am about to embark once again in drastic hair changes (going blonde hopefully this weekend), so I decided to do a post dedicated to where I have come from in terms of hair-dye adventures.  I have been dying my hair since I was in grade 6.  Back then it was semi-permanent red shades only.  And they probably looked awful.  I remember them turning out bright red on the top and being just subtle red on the ends...I have since learned this is due to both the heat of the scalp speeding up processing as well as just the "freshness" of the hair (stuff at the ends is obviously less new...lol).  I don't remember the first time I did a permanent dye, but it was probably also a red shade.  I played around with red and auburn and darker browns until about grade 10 when my boyfriend at the time liked blonde hair, so I attempted a blonde dye.  Blonde dye over red dye = orangey hair.  Haha.  I tried to pass it off as strawberry blonde though and it didn't look awful, just...not awesome.  So back to browns and auburns again.

Here's on of the earliest pics I have of reddish hair colour

Nothing special really...

Then in grade 12 I bleached for the first time.  It was totally covert and hilarious now looking back as I did it completely wrong basically.  Okay, not wrong...just really awful for my scalp.  I slathered the bleach mix on, wrapped my head in saran wrap and then stuck a hat on my head and ate lunch with my mom and she didn't know what was going on.  Haha.  Then I checked on it after an hour perhaps and it was yellow so I rinsed it out and had strawfeeling yellowy hair with orangey ends.  I tried to tone this down a bunch with semi and perm colours in blonde, but it still was pretty yellow looking.  Haha.  I eventually dyed the underside hot pink and put some streaks of pink in and got that for my grade 12 class pic.  But for grad I needed to go back to brown, so I did. 

More story after the jump...LOADS of pics, sorry anyone with dialup still...



I think I was a brunette for that whole summer and when I went off to college I dyed my hair blue-black after I got there.  Then I bleached out the under layers and dyed those hot pink.  Then I chopped off most of my hair.  I went from having past my shoulders hair to this...

I obviously also bleached it...hehe.  The hairdresser joked that she should charge by the pound cuz she was cutting off so much hair.  I had already cut off a big chunk myself because I didn't want extra fees for long hair.  This bleach job was horrible.  I burnt my scalp actually and had like gross sticky scalp for a couple days.  I then also dyed this hot pink for me and my soon to be boyfriend's first formal. 

Horrible quality pictures as they're scanned from a 35mm film camera I think?  So this was in 2005.  About a week after the banquet me and my crush went to...we started dating officially.  And we're still together, haha, 5 years and change.  So that's an interesting trip down memory lane for me.  Haha.  You can also see that I have a lot of time to pass still before we get to current hair status. 

I dyed my hair before going to visit Sean the next week cuz I didn't want his parents to meet me with hot pink hair, it was this lovely auburn colour that made my green eyes go *ZING* and I loved it, but it totally faded super fast. 

I actually forget a lot of what I did in 2nd year of college.  Haha, I think there was some more brown dyes, another blonde attempt, attempting to put red in over blonde and then having it turn this disgusting orange shade so I wore a hat to school and bought some brown "spice" dye asap to cover it up with.  And then probably more browns.  Haha.  I don't seem to have any pics handy of any of that. 

So onto third year of college, or 06/07.  Boyfriend had moved to same town as my college so I spent a lot of time there and I think I dyed my hair at his place several times haha.  I had pretty much my natural hair colour in so I put some dark blue in the underneath and in my bangs...

Can't really see it well, as this is a phone pic.  This was from my bday out with family and the funniest thing was my Grandma really liked my hair. 

I then was like "screw this, lets go all the way" and bleached the brown out (the blue didn't bleach out at all, strange) and dyed my whole head blue.  I don't have any pics on hand of that as I hadn't gotten my own camera then...I do have a video somewhere of me going "I have blue hairrrrrr" but it looks black in the video.  Lol. OH I found a pic

Awful fading...haha

So blue faded to greeny peacock colour and I dyed it black.  Black faded and was greenish black which was weird.  I then attempted to put streaks in my hair but it failed miserably and I ended up with blonde patched all over my head so I just was like "meh" and bleached my whole head twice.  My hair was then faded green colour because the blue dye still wasn't coming out fully.  So I dyed my hair light brown.  But I argue that you could probably call it dark blonde...haha. 

This is probably the only time a light colour didn't come out brassy, because I already had blueish greenish colour in my hair to begin with.  Lol. 

I kept it this colour for a few months before bleaching it again...

(There's the yellow I'm used to!)

And...dying it HOT pink again.

I freaking LOVED this on me.  Everyone commented how awesome it was, I was the "girl with the pink hair" at school, and people even said that it looked natural for me to have pink hair.  Haha.  Bonus was that lipstick looked great too. 

But, I couldn't be this way forever...:(
So I dyed it auburn again and then brown again and it all faded and was weird and my roots came in and it looked really strange too. 

Strange auburn pinkish with fading ends...

Strange brownish with roots...this is when I learned how curly my hair goes in humidity. Lol.

So I kept it this way through the summer, had the hair dresser tell me that she couldn't razor my ends cuz they would go mushy from my bleaching them...haha.  And when I got to 4th year college (07/08) I dyed it black to just be done with the weirdo colours.

Crappy phone pic...

I then proceeded to do my most favourite "semi-workplace friendly" hair ever.  I bleached two streaks behind my ears and a streak in the underlayer of my bangs and dyed them deep bright red.

Can't see the behind-the-ear ones much but they're peekaboo and awesome when my hair was up.  I loved this look so much.  But I couldn't have it forever cuz it was a hassle to bleach teeny parts and not get it anywhere else and then redye the red every week cuz it faded so much....so I bleached it all just to get out the black and the dyed it dark brown.  I also eventually cut it short again because the ends were fried.  I had it dark brown and long for grad pics and then short for actual grad.

And this faded a touch obviously...but I let it just grow and grow and grow because I had promised my mom that I would grow out my natural colour again.  So approx 2 years later....my hair was all natural and long and healthy and I had forgotten what it was to dye my hair...haha.

I've posted this pic before...

And then a few weeks ago I attempted blonde, it didn't work well, so I dyed it "dark rich blonde" which turns out is like my medium brown colour actually...Haha.

You've seen this one recently too...
So it's faded a bit, but basically I'm as a neutral/golden medium brown and my next experiment is to go neutral/cool medium blonde!

And for fun, I'll leave you with my natural natural colour from when I was very short and small...haha

So there's my uberlong post about my hair...haha, I'll hopefully have good pics on Saturday evening of my new blonde 'do.  I just discovered that there is a Sally Beauty Supply near me so I'm checking that out on Wednesday...yay!

- Love, Becka