I’ve longed for pastel coloured mermaid hair for a long time now, but I’ve never taken the plunge as, even though we don’t have a policy on wacky hair colours at work, I just know there’d be a few raised eyebrows and I’d rather avoid it! So, as we’re off on holiday on for a few weeks (we will be on holiday as you read this), I thought it would be the perfect time to try a non-permanent hair colour.
Bleach London are the brand I always look to for pastel hair colours and I already love their silver shampoo and conditioner, so I picked up their Gritty in Pink kit from Boots (£7). It has minis of their popular Violet Skies, Awkward Peach and Rosé colours so it’s the perfect way to try out some colours before investing in a bigger bottle.
The instructions say to shampoo your hair, towel-dry it and then apply the colour wearing the enclosed plastic gloves. It advises you to leave it on for about 15 minutes but I left it for 30 minutes as I hoped it would mean the colour would take a little more. Obviously about a 1/3 of my hair at the moment is my roots, which are a dark blonde, and I kind of figured that the colour wouldn’t take to that, but I thought it would work quite well on the section of my hair that’s previously been highlighted and bleached.
After half an hour I rinsed out the colour and blow-dried my hair. This is the result (sorry for the bad phone pics – Tom was away when I did it so I didn’t have anyone to take snaps for me!) – as I suspected there was no hint of colour on my roots but it did take to the previously colour sections.
The colour looked really bright when I put the dye on so I was surprised at the washed out effect it gave as it wasn’t bright at all – I actually quite like this effect though as it’s more subtle. I really couldn’t make up my mind whether I liked it on me but I was intrigued to see how long the colour would last. It advises 2-10 washes on the bottle but as I have such bleached hair already I figured that it had a good chance of taking to my hair.
The next day I went for a run and had to wash my hair afterwards. I mixed the remainder of the contents of the bottle with my conditioner so I was pretty surprised to see that it had washed out loads just in that one wash (especially since I used the dye again a second time). It was now a very light pink, almost like the lilac tone I get when I leave on my silver/purple shampoo too long. I’m guessing on the second wash it will have completely washed out.
Reading other blog reviews it seems like the dyes work really differently depending on your hair type, how coloured it’s been in the past, how you apply it and so on – so it’s difficult to review it as every result will be different. For me, I’d definitely use it again for a temporary effect, but it’s clearly not going to last my two week holiday! I have heard that the blue tones and the Violet Skies colour last a lot longer (and are pretty hard to shift apparently!) so they would be options if you were looking for longer term colour.
Have you tried any of the Bleach London semi-permanent colours?
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