I recently had a question e-mailed to me from a girl from the vintage hair group asking me about how I got my hair from my natural color to blonde. I figured this is a frequent enough question asked to write a blog post about how to get the blonde, and how to maintain it/treat it.
First things first, this is my natural color:
My current color is the color you see in all of my posts. I've been dying my hair blonde for a year. Please note that this tutorial is for those of you who have virgin hair. Removing dye from your hair to go blonde is a whole different subject and puts your hair through a lot more damage then taking virgin hair to blonde. For those of you with processed hair, I recommend using a color stripper to remove the dye you have from your hair or getting gradual highlights.
Tips for bleaching:
-DO NOT buy box bleaching kits. The volume of peroxide in these kits do not go above 20, so unless you are already light haired they won't work.
-DO buy bleach and developer at a beauty supply store. The brand of powder bleach I use is Wella this is for off the scalp (for on the scalp use this Wella product) and 40 volume developer. If you buy these in a bigger quantity you will save money.
-DO NOT use a clear developer in your hair. This is just a personal recommendation. The creme has a better consistency and the clear developer can be rough on your scalp.
-DO use a creme developer, especially for root touch-ups later on, it is thicker and easier to work with.
-DO NOT bleach your hair to white. This will completely over-process your hair and there will be nothing you can do to fix it. I know, I have done it. I have the breakage to prove it.
-DO bleach to a pale yellow. Once you get your hair to this color you can tone it with a toner, or with a toning shampoo.
So I bet you are wondering how do I actually bleach my hair when I have this information. My suggestion is decide how light your hair already is and how light you want to go. My natural hair color is about a 2 on the level system, the color I am is about an 11. You really only want to bleach to 10, then tone. Now once you know how light or dark your hair is you should pick the volume of developer to use. Each volume represents how many levels the bleach has the capacity to lift your hair. If you are as dark as I am you should use a 40. Remember, you can always bleach gradually, but you can't undo damage that is done to your hair.
Once you determine which developer you are going to use and buy the products you can get to bleaching your hair.
My personal recommendations are to split your hair in 4 sections. You can start bleaching by apply an off the scalp bleach to the middle of your strand, once you have done all the middle strands on your head you can apply it to the roots and end which should process quicker than the middle.
I personally bleach the front of my head first, and then the back separately because it takes me awhile to apply the bleach and my hair processes quickly. I recommend this if you are doing it yourself without any help because bleaching the back of your hair yourself can be time consuming.
Once you have your hair bleached to about this color, you'll be ready to tone your hair. For some of you it may take a second bleaching in areas or overall, but just be careful on areas that are already light enough not to overlap.
So once you have this color similar to this one your hair will be ready to tone. You might not want to do this right after bleaching because a toner can be really irritating to your scalp, especially when applying it to an already irritated scalp.
You can pick a toner according to the shade you want, but in my experience this is the toner I have had the most luck with. This toner is violet based, if you the color you got after bleaching is super light, you may not want to leave this on for more than 5 minutes because your hair could pick up all the purple in this dye. Again, just time it based on what you are starting with. This is going to take all that unwanted yellow out of your hair and make it the white you are looking for.
Results should be something like this:
Products that are really helpful in maintaing platinum hair are :
Shimmer Lights shampoo- Again, this is violet based, great for taking out the yellow in the shower... not so good for leaving on your hair too long. You should use this about once a week.
Ion 3-Step Emergency Hair Repair Kit- This one has gotten alot of good reviews and I did find it helpful in keeping my hair healthy last June when I had a breakage episode.
Ion Effective Care Intensive Therapy treatment- I usually use this after every bleaching, it will add some keratin back into your hair, this has helped me on more than one occasion
ApHogee Pr0-Vitamin Leave-In Conditioner- Really any leave in conditioner will do but I don't really like the smell of Ion's so I tried this one. A leave in conditioner can be really helpful when bleaching dries you out.
I have also had good experience with Aussie's 3-minute miracle.
My biggest recommendation is lay off the heat. I do not flat iron my hair, and I blow dry it once maybe twice a week. Also, be gentle to your hair especially when it is wet, your hair is more likely to break then. I now use a wide tooth comb on my hair after the shower. I also have switched to a boars bristle brush.
Although I do not go to salons to get my color done, I do recommend going to a salon for hair treatments. Last June I had an overlapping incident of bleach which gave me some breakage. I went to the salon the day after and they did a treatment on my hair, after that my breakage stopped and I have tried my best to take care of my hair since then.
Any other questions feel free to ask, I am sure there are tons of things I haven't remembered to include in here.