My friend Brooke and I have always experimented on my hair together. When I was a sophomore in high school, we somehow talked my mom into letting me bleach my hair. I ended up with a delightful shade of orange hair just in time for my moms wedding. Oops. For the two years that I kept my hair bleach blonde, Brooke touched up the roots for me every time and endured the squirming and whining as my scalp burned. (She even dyed it black that week in the middle where i thought I’d like to look like Angelina Jolie in hackers.)

A couple months ago when Brooke and I were at the lake (as we are every Wednesday in the summer) we noticed a girl with a blue under layer in her black hair. As we admired it from afar, we talked about how it would be fun to do on ourselves. Once we were convinced we would indeed like to do it, we combed the whole lake to find the girl and ask her how it was done. She gave me explicit instructions and a few days later I found myself squirming once again as my scalp burned.

We first had to bleach out our hair. It turned kinda orangy but definitely lightened up a lot.

Then I applied blue and Brooke chose vampire red, which was supposed to be a really dark red that she was hoping would be more subtle than blue.

Turns out Vampire Red is actually fluorescent red and the dark blue was hardly noticeable unless in direct sunlight. We ended up wanting each others hair.

Brooke:

So after several weeks of taking blue showers, and dealing with my hair fading to green, I decided that I’d like to go ahead and go red. After using hair color stripper twice, we managed to remove enough of the blue and get it to take the red. (my worst case scenario in this is that my hair would turn purple and I would just dye dark brown over it. I hate purple.)

I have to say that I like it so much better now!