Say goodbye to my hennahead!

That's right. I am no longer a hennahead. One day, I got a bug in my ear in was just tired of my red hair and wanted my natural hair color back. Ummm...wow. What a process. I knew the henna was going to be hard to remove, but I didn't know the odyssey I was in for!

I made my way over to the local beauty supply store and talked to one of the sales people. She advised me that since they didn't have a vegetable stripper in stock (the easiest way to strip the henna), she recommended mixing bleach with equal amounts of developer and shampoo. I did it. It was okay. My head was a little tender, but I ended up with white roots and flourescent orange ends. I made my way back up to the beauty supply store and purchased a tub of lightener/bleach and made my way back home to do it again. This time I tried not to let it touch my scalp, but it did. I left it in as long as I could and rinsed it out. The roots were very white and my ends were now flourescent orange!

Enter's sister: I asked her to come help me bleach my ends so the color would take. I put in bleach + 40 volume developer. For those of you who don't know...40 volume developer is the big guns. She applied it, we let it sit and I rinsed it out. The ends were now an orange creamsicle color. I decided I had fried my hair enough (and my scalp) that I just needed to get the color on so I could go back to classes on Monday (Remember, I had to take a hiatus for medical issues).

Since I had to bleach my hair so much to get as much henna out as I could, I had to repigment my hair before putting on my color. Basically, it's restoring the natural bleaching process (i.e. when you bleach your hair goes from red to orange to yellow, so I had to go from yellow-orange to red to dark blonde). We applied the repigment. My scalp was objecting to more developer on my head, but I cowboyed up. After processing for 10 minutes, they (my mom was now involved because my sister decided she wanted to be blonde again from being a dark blonde. The day before, I had bleached from her demarcation line to the ends. The next day, I had put some bleach on her roots and put a stronger bleach on her ends before we got to my hair) had to wipe off the color. They were trying so hard to be gentle but it was basically torture. My scalp hurt so bad and my head was so tender that no matter what they did, it hurt. I was pretty much in tears when they decided they'd cleaned it enough. Then they had to put the actual color on. My mom on one side, my sister on the other. By then end of that ordeal, I was shaking and my lower lip was trembling and I was just about in tears. Blissfully, it ended.

After my processing time, I rinsed, shampooed and conditioned with a really rich conditioner. The roots are very dark. Presumably from their inability to get all the repigment color effectively off my scalp. The ends look pretty good. I won't know for sure until some of it washes out, but dang. I'm not sure it was worth this torture! I have little sores all over my head! Once I get a chance to take a picture, I promise I'll post.

So now I'm finally back to my natural color...sorta. It looks good and my poor hair needs a couple good protein and moisture treatments. When my hair was wet after rinsing it out, I did the stretch strand test. I'm not kidding...my hair stretched 3 inches, then bounced back to it's original length (I think). Sad to go from such healthy hair to damaged. It could be worse, but it's still a shock!