So lets talk about hair....

I don't think I've posted anything about my hair really. As you may have noticed from my little avatar, my hair has changed quite dramatically.

In April, whilst finishing my MSc, I decided I'd had enough of the long black locks I'd been sporting for some time, and what I actually craved was my natural hair colour whatever that might be.

 I didn't start out wanting to change the length. It sort of became, erm, necessary at a point in the process.

I decided that the best course of action would be to strip the colour out as much as possible, then lighten it with bleach and slap on a decent toner to try and approximate my natural hair colour, or at least something quite close.

I had a hunt around and ordered this stuff:

Which is basically a colour remover. I've used them before, and they work ok, but not that well on dark hair. They work by shrinking the pigment molecules to a size where they can escape the hair shaft - the other thing the process does is open the cuticles up to allow that to happen.

I used this stuff three times. And went from this:

This is my work photo!

to this:

Which was sort of an improvement. You can almost see my roots at my parting, all nice and light!

Actually, I think this might have even been AFTER a liberal application of bleach. It did virtually nothing the first time. The pigment just wasn't going to budge. I took the decision to do the only thing possible, cut it all off.

And so The Beard was instructed to pick up the shears and give me a new hairstyle. Which is what he did, whilst simultaneously terrified. This is what I got:

It was really short. Shorter than I have ever had my hair before! (crikey look at the scarring on my face... this was about 3 weeks before I started using hyaluron and acid exfoliators, the difference is incredible). There may even have been more bleach after this, which caused a slight unevenness in colour.

A couple of days later, after giving my hair a well deserved rest, I bought some dark ash blonde dye and used that to even it all up. I haven't touched the colour since. Most of it has grown out to my natural colour, as I've had 2 haircuts since April. This is now:

(I'm loving my new foundation btw, MAC Studio Sculpt in NW20. Its one of my favourite foundations anyway and it really really suits my skin with the skincare regime I'm following right now)

Give it another few months and it'll be 100% my natural hair colour. Which will look dark blonde on camera, but its actually quite light. My hair has never really photographed well!
I use a purple shampoo to keep the slight orangey tint (I never did get all the dye out) under control, and I use a conditioner designed to maintain the colour of blonde hair.

And so far I've had no desire to dye it ever again! The length is much easier to deal with and I love the asymmetry of having it short on one side and long on the other.