Finding My Inner Blonde: Chapter One

[disclaimer: the photos you are about to view are a little MySpace-esque. That's just how it had to be.]

As part of a general effort to simplify my life, I have decided to return to my natural hair color. Yes, I know, my hair is wildly important shit.

In all seriousness, though, I'm sick of frying my hair, redying the roots, spending money and time and effort every six weeks on something so silly as my freaking hair. I haven't seen my natural color in five years, but since then, it's been every shade of brown, red, and for a while, bleach-white (which would unfortunately sometimes turn a delicate shade of lavender because of all the toning products to keep it from looking the color of baby chickens).



This was what I started with on Wednesday:

Then I stripped the color and the result was this hot mess:

So then I tried to dye it blonde. That didn't lift the red. Then I bleached it again. Then I added a demipermanent medium golden blonde dye (which, I think, is something like my natural color). And here's what we've got now:

Strictly speaking, this is not at all what I was going for. The bad news is that I'm going to have to keep dying it with the semipermanent stuff every three weeks or so until it all grows out, and the texture is exactly what you'd expect after all those chemicals. The good news is that it doesn't look completely terrible. It is very ginger. Hm.