purple

It’s been a big few weeks hasn’t it? Intense. I think I need to break up the intensity a bit. I do actually have a life outside of this blog and the work I do with fat activism, believe it or not. I have a great job that I love (well, most of the time!) and I surround myself with great friends. So when this intense stuff happens, it can kind of impact on my regular life – particularly if the topics are triggering or upsetting in any way.

It’s those times I need to sit back and focus on some self care. Self care for me usually means spending time doing things that enrich my soul, rather than the things I have to put bits of my soul into. One of those is playing around with my hair colour, just for some fun. Particularly now that my hair is short, and I can chop and change it every few weeks.

I dyed my hair purple this morning. I’m not actually all that happy with it, it’s kind of bland. I was aiming for a bright magenta colour, but it all washed out to a kind of mid-purple. If anyone has any suggestions on how to get that bright magenta, please let me know.

So how did I do it? Well, I started by bleaching the crap out of my hair last night. My hair is naturally a very dark brown (with quite a few greys now), so it takes bleaching to be able to get bright crayon colours in my hair. I’m lucky though, my hair bleaches quickly and right back to yellow, so I don’t do too much damage to it.

Then I took these:

And then you need these:

Then you put a little of this in here:

Squirt in a little of this:

Now mix it together like this:

Once you have them all mixed up evenly, slap it all over your hair. Get it in all evenly, spread over all of your hair. Then stick a $1 bathing cap on your head (make sure you clean it off any bits of skin it schmeared to) and go do something else for an hour. I chose to play Animal Crossing on my Wii.

An hour later, go have a shower. Rinse all that purpley colour out of your hair, run it all off until the water runs clear. Then dry off with a good fluffy towel, and VOILA! You have:

Oh God it’s so fluffy!! I usually use some texturising product in it, this is pretty much fresh after drying. See the colour isn’t quite as bold as I would have liked it.

I think I might just use the rest of the blue dye and turn it all blue.