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Hair care and hair bleaching (healthy way)
There is no healthy way to lift color of your hair. No matter how hard you try, your hair will suffer some demage. But there is something that you can actually do to make the damage minimal. How?
What everyone will tell you is let your hair sit in it's natural oils for few days before you decide to bleach it and that is the ultimate true. If your hair is camouflaged with the oils it will not damage it as it would clean, dry hair. But I believe that you should leave one month to treat your hair with all kinds of nice, rich oils to hydrate it and nourish it before you kill it.
I had bleached my hair for the very first time last year, and I did reach the color that I wanted, but my hair was so damaged that after few months of trying to save it I decided to cut it off. And I am not talking about a little trim, I am talking about going from shoulder-blade to pixie cut.
Now that I have an outgrown pixie which will in few months turn into a bob, I decided to go light blonde again. This is how it looked before the bleaching sessions (say hi to Cookie xD )
I did the first 2 bleaching sessions and even my hair is damaged it is not even nearly damaged as the disaster that I had last year. What I did?
Well first it's the month of nourishment.
When you decide to bleach your hair, or do some drastic change (color wise) take all of your heat hair tools and lock them away and throw away the key. I suggest you don't use any heat tools on your hair for at least a month. This will less the damage to your hair overall, this way the damage that would normally heat tools do, bleach will take over.
Also, I washed my hair only once every week or every 12 days. I know a lot of people can't really do that, because their hair gets oily easily, and you don't really need to wait that long but what I do suggest is try to minimize usage of shampoo and add the usage of hair oils. I used coconut oil, extra virgin olive oil, avocado oil and argan oil to treat my hair.
When I used them?
I would mostly add a small amount of avocado oil after I washed and dried my hair. This way you are putting back some of the oils you took away as some shampoos can do their job very well. Meaning, they clean all of the oils of your hair, but those oils are exactly what your hair needs to stay healthy and strong.
When I decide to wash my hair I would ,the night before washing, make an oil hair bomb. Which means mixing all the oils I mentioned earlier and massage them into the scalp and run them trough my hair and let it sit over the night. In the morning I would normally shampoo my hair and then put the conditioner and the hair mask and leave them in for at least an hour. After that just rinse your hair first in warm water to get all the product out of your hair and then with colder water to make sure you reduce the fuzz that may appear.
LEAVE YOUR HAIR TO AIR DRY! Or at least use blow-drier for not more than 5 minutes. This way you get to dry the hair that much that you are sure there won't be any water dripping of your hair and your scalp should be almost dry.
Now to the process of bleaching.
The products I used were bleaching powder from brand called Selective professional and also 20 volume oxy from the same brand.
They have packaging of half a kilo on their site, but if you are able to go to their store they also sell a smaller packaging of 30 grams, which come in small bags. The only reason why I didn't buy the bigger package is because I didn't know if I would like this bleach, but let me tell you IT WAS PERFECT! Normally bleaching powders tend to smell unpleasantly, but this one actually smells like apple once you mix it with the oxy, and my scalp didn't burn like it did with the previous bleach.
I mixed it normally to 1:2 ratio, or rather say 60 grams of bleaching powder on 120 milliliters of oxy.
Left it in my hair for 10 minutes and washed it off.
Yes, only for 10 minutes this way your hair won't be as damaged as if you left the bleach for 40 minutes, or as some people do for an hour. So, as I was saying I washed my hair and putted a huge amount of hair mask and conditioner, left that for an hour and rinsed it. Left it to air dry. After it dried I could see that some parts bleach missed, and because my natural hair is mid brown color, some parts had a little bit orange tone to it.
So, what I did next?
Put all kinds of oils in my hair, generous amount if I may add, slept with it and in the morning I went with another round of bleach. This time, first I putted bleach on the dark parts of my hair and then I spread the bleach on the rest of the hair, this way I could even the color of the whole hair.
Left the bleach in for 10 minutes and rinsed it out. Repeated mask+conditioner routine.
After all was done, my hair was still a little bit yellowish (the first picture) , but I decided to fight it with silver shampoo, which was also Selective professional.
This shampoo actually helped a lot. I used it around 4 times and my hair lost yellow tone to it, but because it wasn't bleached to that platinum blonde, it kinda still had a little bit of yellowish tone.
This is when I decided to play with semi permanent colors, and instead of just getting my hair lighter to be sure this will actually work I decided to just go for it.
I left my hair for one week when I just toned it with the shampoo, and the yellow tone faded nicely.
So, what I did? I mixed lavender color and a little bit of red flamenco color (which is mostly deep pink) with loooooooots of hair mask......
Apparently, I diluted the colors waaaaaaaaaay too much and this happened.
So the color obviously wasn't what I expected it to be. It got yellow-pink. I kept it for a while, maybe for around 2 weeks and got used to it.
However, no matter how much I liked it I wanted my hair lavender or back to blonde, and I am still on that quest.
So I was planning how to get my hair lighter, and instead of bleaching it again I decided to go with a hair dye, a permanent one. So I went back to Selective professional shop (they seem legit) and got the goods.
This time I bought a 30 volume oxy, and a permanent color no. 9.1 which says that it's ashy blonde, and while I was there a good lady told me that they now have something called Powerplex available. What does this PowerPlex do? Well, it is something similar to Olaplex.
It basically reconstructs your hair and helps to prevent any kind of damage that may appear while bleaching your hair or even after bleaching. What they swear this product does is reconnects the molecules of your hair that lost the connection between themselves and therefore tends to break or simply fall off. This reconnecting of molecules is supposed to keep molecules safely bounded together, therefore no hair breakage.Plus, you can use it even on its own mixing it with just pure warm water, this way it can help damaged (bleached, processed) hair and strengthen it. So I decided to try it off.
They had this cute small packing that is meant for 1 or 2 uses (depending on your hair length).
After the whole process of keeping the hair dye on my hair for 35 minutes and washing it off, I noticed it didn't really turned that much ashy. Sure, it got lighter but ashyness just wasn't there, maybe that was due to yellow tone in my hair. However, it wasn't that much of a fail, since my hair got lighter and the Powerplex thingy worked. My hair is actually extreamly soft, and I didn't have any breakage even tho I used such a high volume developer.
So the final thing is here!!
