One of my interests that I listed in my biography is hair dye. In the interest of ignoring all of the work and research I have to do in the next few weeks*, I’m going to tell you about it.

A picture from when I redyed my hair a few weeks ago. Notice the paper towel underneath it so I don’t get pink everywhere.

I’ve been dying my own hair for a few years now, and I’ve recently started dying some of my friends’ hair when they asked — they think that I’m magical or something because it always turns out stunning but really, in the interest of full disclosure, hair dye is just guesswork. The actual dying part is easy, because all you have to do is paint it on the hair with either a brush or your fingers**. So is mixing the dye. You choose either a color or colors, and maybe some white conditioner if you want to make it lighter, and mix them all together before dumping it on someone’s head. The proportions are what’s difficult though. It’s choosing the proportions of colors to put in the mix that involves the most guesswork.

Do I want one drop or two of the reddish-purple? Do I want to put a little or a lot of purple into the blue? It all depends on what color you want, and, potentially, whether you mess up and put more color than you were expecting to into the mix (sorry Rachel. I did not mean to make your hair reddish purple instead of orchid).

It’s a pretty simple thing, actually. I might make a post about bleach later, because that is much more difficult and can be legitimately dangerous if you do it wrong. But dying hair? Is just painting. And, if you do it enough and speak confidently enough about different colors and stuff, people might just think you’re a wizard when their hair magically turns purple.

* I am definitely going to do it, and I am pretty well prepared for it. Sometimes it’s good to take a break though!

** I would definitely recommend using disposable gloves if you’re going to do this at home though and especially if you’re going to use your fingers instead of a brush to paint your or your friends’ hair — no one wants bright blue hands for a week. No one.***

*** I may or may not be speaking from experience about that.