This may sound a bit silly, but is there some way I can understand what state my hair is in? If it is too damaged and how much more it can stand?

I cut my hair about a week ago (on my own yay) and chopped off about 15-20cm so what's left of it, which is still below shoulder length, is pretty soft. Some of my hair is normal but some hair are stretchy.

I wanna dye it soon because after 4 months of never-fading purple I am a bit tired of it and it doesn't even look good (or really purple). Parts of my hair has turned brownish because of the Purple Haze I tried which didn't work on my hair.

So after washing it as much as I could I realized it isn't going to fade anymore so the next solution is to try and bleach it out. I bought some bleach powder and some 20 volume developer and want to try a bleach bath with that so that I can hopefully lift some of the colour. Since I have no experience bleaching my hair on my own, how can I know if my hair can take bleaching? And how much it can stand without melting? :/

Any tips from personal experience or anything are welcome!

And another question: I have about 5cm of brown roots. I don't have to bleach those first, do I?

Sorry for the long post, I just want to be safe before I try to put bleach on my hair on my own. ^_^

I'll look this up when I get back (still in Ireland at the moment) but there are some tests you can do to check how hydrated your hair is.
I heard that floating a hair on some water and seeing how long it takes to sink can tell you something about the porosity of your hair. I'll find out about that and get back to you.

Another thing you can try is taking a hair and stretching it. If it springs back to the same shape your hair is in pretty good condition. If it doesn't go back to shape (goes bent or crinkled) then it's in poor condition and if it breaks, well you know it shouldn't be allowed anywhere near bleach!

For the bleach bath you could try making it really weak (lots of shampoo) and seeing how much colour it lifts. If it doesn't take enough out wait a few days and repeat. That way you'll be able to assess the damage more easily. Be careful about getting it on your regrowth as it will lift your natural colour a bit and might cause it to look reddish. If you want to bleach the regrowth I would do that separately and maybe do the bleach bath part for the last 5-10 minutes of bleaching your roots.

Thank you very much!

Most of my hair just spring back to its previous state without any crinkling (a few with very little). A couple of hairs broke off, but I'm not sure if it's because they're too damaged or that I stretched them too far. :/

If it's possible I'd prefer to bleach my regrowth after I get my hair to a more manageable colour. I prefer not to have blonde roots for a few days, they look awful on me. :S

Ok, I'll put lots of dandruff shampoo in the mix, since it cleans hair very deep, maybe it will help the little bleach I put in work better. Maybe a spoonful of each (bleach powder/oxidant)? Or will that be too much?

Oh, since you were looking for ideas for new articles, maybe you could do one about measuring hair damage. (Hmmm don't know if I should have posted that in the other thread!)

Hmm, so I did 2 bleach baths in the last 4 days, using 20 volume bleach. It didn't really do much to fade my colour. The second time I put more bleach and less shampoo than the first time and I think it faded the colour just a tiny little bit more. No one really notices except me because I was looking for even subtle changes.

Should I switch to 30 volume? I don't see the colour fading like this, unless I put way more bleach and leave it on for half an hour instead of 15 minutes. Would that be better?
At least my hair is still the same condition it was. By the way after all this time, the electric blue at my parting (the part more exposed to light) has become bright pink, hehe.

I think I would be more inclined to stick with 20 volume and just increase the development time.

Ok, thanks, I'll give it a try!

And I did try it, just put more bleach in, like 1:1 to the shampoo and left it on for half an hour. I think it lifted it a bit more but now my hair feels a bit dry in comparison to the other times. I'll leave it a few days before I do anything else.

My main problem is some parts of my hair have turned plain brown, I think after I put Purple Haze in, which was like 5 months ago. And I don't know how to get rid of it. It doesn't seem to want to lighten!

I hate when that happens.
What colour are you planning to go next? I'm just wondering whether you can cover that up with a new shade. I think that happened to me once and I was able to dye over it pretty easily.

I was thinking of doing something brighter since it's almost summer, so I got some crazy colour cyclamen, some directions turquoise and some sfx pimpin purple. Thankfully the part that I want to do turquoise is lighter but, unfortunately, the part that I want to do cylamen is the part with the most brown. That is, the sides of my hair from my ear down.:S (If I can, I'll try and post a picture to show the different colours on my hair.)

I don't know if it's going to work on that and I don't want to get another muddy colour. I'm going to try it on a strand, but it's likely that it will end up a darker brownish pink. And with the colour it is, I have no idea if pimpin purple will work either. Deep Purple worked but it looked almost black anyway and it looked a bit dull as it started to lighten.

I'm beginning to wonder if those parts of my hair weren't bleached very well to begin with and the Purple Haze just made it worse. I'm saying this because I'm noticing some random brownish patches at other parts of my hair, too. Does brown never lighten if you do it by mistake?:/

I'll probably try bleach a couple of times more concentrating on the brown areas. Hope my hair doesn't become too damaged!

By the way, I just tried some Turquoise on a strand to see how light the pink has to be to be covered. It looks so pretty I can't wait to use it! ^_^

If you could post a pic that would be most helpful.

I think the brown is either a missed spot when bleaching or a combination of colours. I once dyed my hair a reddish purple. It had almost faded out and I dyed it blue. It was barely noticeable. Anyway, when the blue came out some of the pinkish colour remained and when I dyed over that a teal colour it went kind of brownish - the remaining red tones were mixing with the green in the turquoise and causing it to go brown. It bleached out easily.

Since you're in Greece and have ready access to sunlight (unlike me) you could try exposing some of the darkest areas to the sun. I've had violets lift by 2-3 shades after a day in the sun so it might help.

Those colours you mentioned sound like they're going to look really nice!