Henna

I struggle with hair colour. My hair comes in brown and by the time it reaches the top of my ear it is auburn and then somewhere around my jaw it becomes red. And that is my natural hair colour. What do you even call that? I usually go with auburn, but most people reffer to me as a redhead. My paternal grandmother's hair was nearly the same as mine when she was young and she was considered a redhead. In the sunlight my hair looks very red, but in low lights I have tri-coloured hair that looks like I'm a teenager growing out some bad hair decisions. It's very frustrating. So I figured that a henna dye would brighten the red, colour my roots, and even out the colour.

My mom used Henna when I was a kid to give her red hair a little more oomph, so I figured it would do the same for me. Afterall most hair dyes never really take to my hair. They colour it and then about a week later start to fade, and by the time a month has gone by you can't even tell I dyed it. which is why I've never bothered keeping up a hair colour, I know it'll fade and my weirdo natural hair colour will still be weird. I assumed that this would be the case with henna, maybe it would last a little longer, but it would just give my hair a nice toned colour for the time being. Normal hair dyes have to be left on my head for and hour to an hour and a half before I can wash it out. The box of henna suggested 45 mins. I figured I'd go with that.

I should probably tell you that I didn't add enough water in these at this point. It ends up looking like runny baby poo.

Henna is messy. And smells awful. It's like seaweed and boiling leaves with a hint of dirt. The instructions I had suggested that to counter the smell, and to brighten your red, add some paprika. So I did. I added quite a bit figuring that this might help achieve that brighter, more toned colour I so desired.  Henna has to be applied with golves on at all times. It gets everywhere and dyes everything it touches. The finished product looks like baby poo. The instructions call it yogurt like. There is a reason I hate yogurt. When you are done applying it to your head is looks like you took a ritual tribal mud bath and didn't bother to rinse out your hair.

I was very pleased to find that it took less time to rinse out that traditional hair dye. But it smells awful. Seriously awful. When I got out of the shower it was quite obviously much brighter. So I toweled it dry and went to bed. And woke up like this:

Basically, I love it! It's taking a little bit of getting used to, but I really love the way it come out. Of course it wasn't what I expected. I was aiming for a nice auburn and came out looking like Amy Pond. Actually the ends of my hair aren't all that different than they were before, but at least my roots look like the rest of my hair now! But I quite like it!

oh yeah, and I cut my bangs.  :-)