It’s no secret that ombre and dip dye hair trends have been all the rage this spring/summer 2012, but what you may not know is that the whole process is much more complicated than you think. We went ahead and jumped right into the fad back in March by going after a lilac hair effect, ombred from blonde at the top to light purple towards the bottom. Seeing as we’re not hair experts, we didn’t realize that it would be impossible to achieve the tone of purple we were drooling over without first bleaching our already blonde locks even blonder. Actually, our hair stylist(s) didn’t realize that either. We say stylists because it took 3 salons and hundreds of wasted dollars to only arrive back at square one, in worse shape than we started.
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We’re not here to depress or crush the hopes of future ombre or dip dye hair contenders, we totally love the look and so do celebs, but we wanted to be frank with you before you step into a salon hoping for a product that you probably wont get before finally leaving the salon depressed and poor. #FashionGirlProblems. Below, we’ve put together a calender of events as to how going after lilac ombre hair went down for us.
Leave a comment below if you’ve had a terrible ombre or dip dye hair experience. If you’ve had a great one, let ladies know where you went and what you got!
How I Never Actually Got Pretty Lilac Purple Ombre Hair
Salon #1: With positive thoughts and excitement, I walked into an Aveda salon and asked if they could give me my purple ombre hair that I was obsessing over. I had blonde hair at this point. I left shortly after with wet hair that was in the shade of dark dark dark purple hair. I was in a hurry and couldn’t wait for the blowdry, but I was so anxious to see my hair dry into light powdery lilac shades. It didn’t. It dried and turned into red/brown/dirty hair.
Rating – FAIL
Salon #2: Totally pee-oed, I decided that the stylist who had worked on my hair had no idea how to achieve the color I wanted, so I went on my merry way to another salon in a high end hotel. I was completely confident that my new stylist could fix this mess because she assured me she could, so I went under the color bowl again for a day of havoc. After bleaching my poor head for way too long so that the red/brown/dirty color dispersed, I had a yellow/orange/hideous colored mane that was nappy and knotty. The stylist contintued to assure me she knew what she was doing and when I finished I had more than half of my head colored in a deep eggplant, almost black shade. Ahh!
Rating – Super FAIL
Deeply saddened, beyond depressed, and extraordinarily angry, I gave up on my hopes of achieving beautiful lilac ombred ends and decided to face the reality that I would have a head of almost black ends combined with blonde top until it faded and grew out. Fortunately and to my surprise, over the course of the next week, a lot of the dark color washed out and turned into somewhat of a lilac color mixed with red tones. It wasn’t great, but it was much better than my harsh eggplant ends and I decided I could live with it.
Salon #3: Having vowed to myself and my frantic Mother never to trust someone with ombreing my fragile hair again, I caved in after arriving in SoCal and allowed a stylist to talk me into doing a “beautiful blonde to lilac ombre hairdo”. After 3 days, yes I said 3 days (28 hours in the hair salon chair), I left in tears and now told myself that I would never dye or even highlight my hair ever again and couldn’t wait for my natural hair color to grow back. You see, there was a ridiculous amount of color deposited on my hair from before which meant that my hair wasn’t going to do the normal things that hair does with color. During my visits to salon #3, my porous hair went from shades of blue to green to a final allover yellow product…and then my ombre was gone. Ghaaah!
Rating – Kill Me FAIL
Here are some of my best moments as an eggplant-ombred gal
Brnady Chan
try using a semi- permanent purple dye like manic panic, special effects, etc. To get the lilac color you can mix conditioner with the purple dye to make it lighter or just buy a light purple dye. Going to a salon isn’t necessary.
Gretchen Hackmann
awesome! Thank you for your easy tips 😉
Sisi Tsoi
Hey We think you still rather awesome!!
Gretchen Hackmann
thanks @google-73fca1147984868db8ddf5f4e004cf18:disqus 😉