Ginger(ish)

I’m pretty much never satisfied with my hair.

I get a trim and my bangs look weird.
I wear them in a barrette for awhile… and then I feel like I need them trimmed.
I’ll like the color and then BOOM I have 4 inch long roots.
I decide that I can’t handle the length anymore, so I chop off 7 inches and hate it.

Typically I solve these issues by just living with it and deciding that I actually don’t really care. You know, the whole ‘fake it until you make it thing’ but with ambivalence.

In June when I decided I couldn’t live with my roots for a minute longer, obviously something had to be done. However, my hair stylist/colorist was on leave for 6 months (or forever, the salon was weirdly vague) and the last thing I felt like doing was spending a crapload of money to break in a new colorist. So, I stopped by the store and grabbed a box of hair dye.

No biggie, I started dying my hair on my own when I was about 15 years old… so it’s not like I was a dye virgin. I’ve pretty much had every color of hair ever – red, blond, black, streaks of purple, green, blue, yellow, etc. I’d been getting it professionally dyed and highlighted for the last 5 years or so, but I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal to cheap out since the color I picked – natural copper red – was pretty similar to my previous hair color.

I popped the box open, sloshed it on my head, washed it out and… holy poop. It was NOT EVEN close to the color on the box. Instead, my hair was super dark brown and almost black at the ends. Um, where was my “natural” copper?!

So, I did what I always do and ignored it. I went down to the beach for a week and figured it would fade to something I didn’t hate.

But it didn’t.
And I kind of hated it.

A photo posted by pocketfulofjoules (@pocketfulofjoules) on May 27, 2015 at 11:13am PDT

 I washed my hair with clarifying shampoo multiple times every day for a week, but the color hardly faded at all. I finally gave up and got my ends trimmed to get rid of the super dark black parts. I did my default move and ignored it for a while, but every time I looked in the mirror I cursed a little bit. Especially because as the dye started slowly washing out of my hair there was a light chunk right in the back of my head. So not cute.

I finally decided that when I got back from BlogHer I’d make an appointment with a colorist to get the reddish color I really wanted. In a stroke of luck, the day before I made the call to a new salon my former colorist Facebook messaged me that she’d moved to a new salon. HOT DOG!

I made an appointment for a couple days later and waited with bated breath. I even saved a couple hair inspiration pictures to my phone because I was DYING to go back to a ginger color.

A photo posted by pocketfulofjoules (@pocketfulofjoules) on Jul 23, 2015 at 6:47pm PDT

It wasn’t easy. Apparently I screwed my hair up pretty badly when I used that $6 box of dye. My hair had to be stripped of color before we could get to the good part. So it took THREE hours to strip my hair, add in highlights and then an all-over color. By the end of the appointment, I basically didn’t want anyone to touch me for the rest of the day after being poked, prodded, washed in the sink over and over, and then prodded again.

It was worth it though, because check out my new color! Here is the day I got it dyed and here it is now (one week later). I literally ran all around my yard to try to get a good picture, so it’s a good thing I don’t have any close neighbors because they’d think I was kinda nuts.

Here’s the color in front of my brick wall, because OF COURSE I have to do a brick wall picture… that’s kind of my thing! {rolls eyes}

Then I galloped around my front yard a bit:

We can’t forget a ‘wind blown’ look, while shyly looking down as if something is funny and kind of embarrassing at the same time. See, I’m TOTALLY a model.

The degree of redness changes depending on what light I’m in, but my colorist did exactly what I asked for when I said “make it look like my head naturally grows reddish hair out of it.” As the color fades – as reds tend to do – the lighter highlights will become more noticeable. Once I get roots, I’ll only need to get a one-color glaze in order to refresh the look.

However, after a week of living with the color I’m thinking maybe I should go a little MORE red next time… Or maybe I’m just kind of red-blind? What do you think?

Are you one of those ‘never satisfied with your hair’ people? What was your biggest hair cut or color mistake?