my hair journey: preview - I see trees and greens - enchanted forest by Manic Panic

So it’s been a very long time since I dyed my hair the last time – I went from pitch black to dark red, then to bright poppy red and then I got bored and dyed it to a honey caramel tone. December 2013 I dyed it back to black and cut off 10 cm, since then I didn’t do anything with my hair. The black dye faded over weeks/months and it turned out quite nice, overall it was a dark brown with lighter ends. Got myself an unintentional ombre look – win! Since I didn’t put any dye on my hair since Dec 2013, I have about 17 cm of natural dark brown regrowth – my hair is now about 52 cm long whoop whoop!!

read about how I started going black to red: black to dark red
read about how I corrected patchy spots: correcting patchy spots
read about how I brightened the red: going bright red
read about how I stripped the color to go honey caramel: red to light brown
read about how I went from red to honey caramel step 2: red to light brown step 2

btw here you see how I went from red to honey

The hair journey goes on!

I was going back and forth if I should go for a lavender lilac or if I should dive into totally unknown territory and try a blueish green tone! Yes, green. After hours of research and skipping through thousands of pics I decided to go with green as my next hair color. Considering my current hair condition and color, I believe that it’s possible to pull off a nice vibrant green. It’s not that green little kids color vomit with.. it’s more like a pine green with a blueish undertone. I think it’s absolutely gorgeous!

btw these are not my pics!

After seeing Manic Panic’s “Enchanted Forest” on some nice gals on google I knew I had to order it. You can use this vegan hair dye on virgin hair but it will fade quicker than you can say “quidditch” – unprocessed hair has a smoother surface and that’s why the dye won’t stick as good as on already processed hair. That’s another reason why I also ordered Directions bleaching kit 30 vol. – with a 30 vol developer it lifts your hair color by 3 levels (+-) – so I’ll get a brighter result + it will last longer. I wouldn’t recommend using a 40 vol developer since this is already pretty harsh – as all chemicals I know – but 30 vol. is just the right thing to use if you don’t want to fry your hair.

I learned a lot from my last experience with bleach and since my hair has natural red undertones I added Directions “White” toner to my order. My hair won’t turn bright blonde after bleaching it, it will have a brassy tone and to correct that you need a toner that will help you pull out the brassiness as much as possible. The toner doesn’t damage your hair at all. It can happen that it will leave a slight purple touch to your hair if you leave it on for too long but that will fade away quickly.

When I remember my vibrant red, washing my hair head over the bathtub with cold water and stained towels, pillows and sheets come to my mind again. This won’t be any different now because I’m using semi-permanent hair dye again. And honestly I would never use anything else. Of course the hair gets somehow damaged while bleaching but still it’s better to only damage it once than damaging it twice in a row. Let me list some pros & cons of using vegan hair dye by Manic Panic

Pros

•  Not tested on animals
• No harsh chemicals that damage your hair
• You can mix colors to get your very own special tone
• You can easily pour some of the left over dye into your conditioner, that way you touch up the color with each wash
• The longer you leave on the dye the more vibrant it will turn out (depends on how light your hair was before)
•  It moisturizes your hair
• Looks frikkin awesome and comes in all kinds of colors
• Not that expensive

Cons

• If you don’t know how to properly take care of your new hair color it will fade very fast
• Stains on the skin and hands are something you should get used to -> use Vaseline and gloves while putting on dye to avoid that
• Stains on the sheets, towels etc
• To maintain a vibrant color you have to touch up quite often (I touched up my red every 3 to 4 weeks, well red is one color to fade away the quickest anyway)

Well, I’m very excited and I can’t wait for my order to arrive :) stay tuned

#dyehard