#29 Asymmetric Plum & Turquoise

Fri 28 August 2009

Adam's hair has been un-dyed for the last few months. This is great - it gives me an almost blank canvas to work with. He showed up at my place with dark roots and bleached, almost blonde midlengths with the slightest yellow tinge from a long forgotten dye job.

I began by bleaching his regrowth, now almost 2 inches long, to a pale blonde colour. For the last 5 minutes of processing I ran the bleach through the mid-lengths and ends to remove the yellow tone. Tah-dah! It's now an even pale blonde.

The photograph shows wet hair and looks much darker than the ideal pale blonde. In real life it was all as light as the root colour.

To prepare for dyeing I made a parting from Adam's right temple, around the back of his head to just behind his left ear. The hair above this parting was clipped out of the way like so:

Just bleached - Adam's hair is now an even pale blonde

At HairCrazy.com, we now sell Directions bundle packs. They're an all in one dyeing kit combining two colours I've selected specially to look good together. For this Adventure I thought I would show you how nicely Turquoise and Plum go together.

Required ingredients:
1 of HairCrazy's Directions Bundles =or= 1 tub Directions Plum, 1 tub Directions Turquoise, latex gloves (plum stains A LOT) and a tint brush.
You'll also need a hair clip.

When you're dyeing your hair a few colours, it makes sense to place the darker colour towards the bottom of the hair so that when you rinse the colour out it doesn't run into the lighter colour. So I began by painting on the plum on the lower portion of Adam's hair.

This is where having a tint brush comes in handy. It's important that you don't overlap the purple into the top section. If you're trying this at home you should try and get someone to help you with this bit or make sure you're good at working in reverse and set up 2 mirrors so you can see what you're doing.

After giving the brush a really good rinse (you'd be surprised how much plum can stay hidden in the bristles), I started applying the Turquoise. At this stage it's best to keep the clip in place and make sure that you get the perimeter of the blue area really well covered using the tint brush.
I applied most of the turquoise and only took the clip off near the end when his hair was saturated with dye enough to hold itself up and away from the plum.

Finally, to make sure the turquoise was really well absorbed I went over the dye and massaged it into the hair until it frothed.

The plum dyed hair is kept well away from the soon-to-be blue hair.

I made myself jealous by using this combination on Adam - two of my favourite colours in one dye job!
You can see from the photos below that putting the plum at the bottom meant that the two colours remained defined.

To complete the look I gave Adam's hair a quick trim with a razor and applied Gatsby's Moving Rubber "Air Rise". It has a light texture but enough hold to give the ends a defined look and keep the direction of the hair.