I Don't Want To Dye Alone

So this is my first proper post and it's a biggie... I will probably cover hair dyeing generally over a few posts, this one is just the process I use every month or two to keep up the colour for now. In the future I will do some other posts on things like my colouring history, how not to bleach your hair, different semi-permanent dyes, permanent dyes, and possibly braving the hairdresser, if I ever do that.
To start with here is a before picture - massive roots, faded red in the middle, bleached a bit at the ends. This is the result of having not permanently dyed my hair for ages, and a bad attempt at bleach ombre. I essentially use semi-permanent dye to cover all of this up until I can be bothered to sort it out properly... 

The dye I use at the moment is Adore Shining Semi-Permanent Hair Color. I have used Bleach London but I will probably save a proper review of that for another post, but in short I use Adore because it lasts a lot longer (and I'm lazy). The colours I used this time are Ruby Red, Crimson and Violet Gem.
There is also a beautiful picture of the dye bottles, brush and mixing pot, a shower cap, and trusty plastic gloves.


So anyway, on with what I actually do. First things first, cover everything. Even with so-called semi-permanent dye (permanent on some surfaces, who knew), this is super important. I use a waterproof table cloth thing on the floor, I wear the same old enormous t-shirt every time, as modelled below, and cover my skin. 
This stuff seriously stains skin. I put vaseline all round my hairline and wear gloves the entire way through, until it is quite well rinsed out. This is the one thing about this dye that is a bit of a pain, because you have to try to apply it without getting it on your scalp. Despite having done this several times now, I still have not got a failsafe method and usually have some pink patches on my head for a while afterwards. 

Usually I use a brush and mixing tub (see above), which came with a bleaching kit once, but this time I mostly ended up just using my fingers while my head was upside down and it was easier to avoid my scalp, if you ignore the back of my head (completely stained).

I used three colours this time because last time I used just crimson and violet gem, and it came out very purple-y on the top, so this time I had ruby red on the roots, then blended crimson in on the lengths and then violet gem on the ends. Because it's semi-permanent it blends together very well and I don't need to worry too much about harsh lines. This is the main reason I use it - it's idiot-proof, speaking as an idiot who tried to bleach ombre her own hair (not so blendable). 

Anyway once it is actually applied (really soaked through), it is time to process. I leave it on for quite a while, because there is no ammonia so it doesn't damage the hair. On the bottle it says to heat process, which I take to mean blasting it with a hairdryer. I put a shower cap over the top to stop it drying out, heat it for five minutes-ish and then hope that my head retains the heat enough by itself because I've got too hot. The shower cap also means you can wander about doing whatever you want without having to worry about it. 
I leave it for about 45 minutes, then rinse in cold, cold, cold water. Super important. This dye washes out, that's what it does, but there's a bunch of things that slow it down, and the biggest of these is using cold water. Hot water it just washes right out. I am actually going to do another post about looking after dyed hair but as part of the process this is super important! So I rinse until I get bored (it says until it runs clear but that just never happens) then shampoo and condition and then done!
As you can see, it is nice and bright, purple-y towards the end and blends in my roots a bit better. The non-ammonia dye also makes hair quite shiny, bonus! 

So I hope that was kind of interesting, I know there's a whole lot of stuff floating around the internet at the moment about bright hair things but there's always more to add. Probably.
I will do my dyed hair maintenance post in a couple of weeks to show what it's like then and how it has faded :)
xxx