light&summery

Today, I performed a service for one of the girls I know in the Sophomore class. Today's agenda: go lighter for summer...but how light? Blonde. Verrrryyyyy BLONDE! We started rounda'bout 10:15 this morning. When I first met this girl - it was outside of school a few years ago - her hair was like this: Since then she had a full highlight done. More or less, color was not in her hair, plenty of lightener though. With roots that went on for about two inches, our original thought was to just do a simple roots - to - ends process and hope that it was just that easy...pffft...yeah, no....

We set to work, and a teacher mixed up a level 9N w/ 30V developer with a sprinkle of lightening powder(bleach).
She pulled blonde alright, but it was so gold!!! (*gooaaaaaaaaaaaalllllllllldennnnnnnnnnn* - ;)
In other words, her hair pulled to probably the warmest tone possible. Now, warmness is not a bad thing....but it's not a one-size-fits-all sort of thing, and for this girl, a blonde this warm was just NOT going to cut it. Her hair is normally what a stylist would call 'ashy', and as we sat there with her head in the sink the teacher who mixed the color is leaning over shaking her head.

"I just don't understand! Why did she pull SO gold!?"
"Well, " I decided to add my input to see if what I was thinking was right "we did put lightener in the color..."
Blank stare for halfa second from the teacher..."YES!"

My guess is that if we had simply used color, no lightener added, it would not have pulled to such a warm tone. If left to my own devices I would have just done all her roots with lightener, let her process, rinsed her out, and then maybe thrown a level 11, maybe 12N or a toner with a violet/blue base over the whole head...foiling out just a few strands to keep dimension. My thinking is, that if she's only ever used bleach...er...lightener on her head, then applying lightener all over her roots would have matched the existing color pretty much perfectly.

But that's not what we did, so that will forever be a "what if..."

With her being SO warm, I applied a level 10 toner to her roots...it toned it down, but just slightly. In the end we were kinda short on time, so I decided to simply take a mohawk section and do what I call a diagonal brick lay foil, touching only her roots, with lightener and 20Volume(teacher's suggestion, I would've used 30V...)and a very fine weave.

I'd say that did the trick. With her roots being so 'long', the color that was applied initially was completely solid, which looked funny compared to the rest of he hair that, having been highlighted, held various strands of color, bringing movement and dimension. By retouching the highlights for the roots at the top of her head we broke up that solid strip of color. :) At 3:00, we were done.

Going blonde is a process. If you're thinking of undergoing this venture, just know that it's complicated, long, and you most likely won't get there the first time around. Just take it in steps. Don't be discouraged. To preserve the strength and integrity of your hair, don't rush it. It may take a couple appointments, and some long hours in the chair to get you there, but bring a book, listen to your iPod, take a nap.
Your hair will thank you for being so patient.
And when your hair is happy, YOU are happy.
And when you are happy about your hair, we're happy too. :)


She took this with her laptop, so it's blurry...but there's the end result. B-L-O-N-D-E!