D.I.Y Hair Colour

So for ages now, I’ve wanted to go blonde. I always got told that I was too pale to pull off a sun-kissed looking blonde, which was the shade I wanted, and so after a while I kind of gave up. Then the trend of dip-dyeing came about, and after going for that, I realised that I didn’t actually look too washed out with the right shade of blonde (almost a darker, sort of dirty blonde colour).

Now, I’ve decided that I want to try and go for a lighter hair colour – however, as I’m now a student I don’t exactly have the budget to just walk into a salon any more. So, I decided to try going for the DIY option… I know, I’m really lucky that I’m not walking around with bright orange hair. I went for L’Oreal Prodigy in “Natural medium blonde”.

So, my hair was like this before the dye was put in… I’d previously dyed the ends blonde with L’Oreal’s Preference Wild Ombrés (shade No. 2), while I still had old highlights in at the top and the rest was just my natural brunette/reddish colour.

The instructions for the dye suggested that I wash it out after half an hour, but when I checked, my hair was still pretty dark and the roots had only just started to get to a lighter brunette colour, so I kept it in for a further half an hour.

By this point, I had searched online to see how long blonde home dye kits normally take to make your hair a really worrying colour and had freaked myself out (just in case my hair was some mad colour I just couldn’t see yet), so I ended up washing it out after a total of an hour of it in my hair.

This was the result…

(This is my "I'm not impressed" face)

I don’t know about you, but I can’t see any difference. I mean, it looks a bit more yellow in a certain light if anything... If you put a light right over the hair on the top of my head, you can see some blonde hairs, but only on the surface. Not exactly the shade I was looking for! I actually feel like my hair looks darker, which isn’t exactly ideal considering I had the dye on for double the time it had told me to keep it on for.

Pretty disappointing; Looks like I might have to just save up and get to a salon after all!