How I messed up my hair in the last three days of 2020

Somehow, I managed to live more than 21 years without ruining my hair. I’ve seen my friends’ hair fall out because of misadventures with bleach, absolutely horrible haircuts and even witnessed a friend shaving off her eyebrows on Facetime. Because I believe we should learn from each other’s mistakes, here’s now I messed up my hair in the last three days of 2020.

Backstory

To understand the drastic actions that are to come, some backstory is required. During the first quarantine back in the spring of 2020, I cut my own bangs while Facetiming with same friend who shaved off her eyebrows. Ever since then, I’ve been on a quest to have pink hair. I’ve had orange and purple dip dye as a teenager, but I’ve never coloured my entire head of hair. In the autumn semester of 2020, I’ve had two failed attempts of pink hair using semi-permanent hair colour. Third time’s the charm, right?

Day 1: 29th of December 2020

Before Christmas, I had bought a box of permanent violet hair colour. Because I wore a purple dress for Christmas, I didn’t feel like I could have purple hair as well. I therefore waited ‘til a couple of days after Christmas before pulling out the box. In the small, badly lit and badly ventilated bathroom at my dad’s place, I committed the first heinous act.

These are all stills from videos I sent to my flatmate back in Aberdeen. In the last, I said “it looks a bit patchy, but it doesn’t do that in person.” A big lie, of course.

The following day, my mum took this lovely photo. I believe it only looks slightly good because my pale face is not in it. It was just way too dark for me, and it felt like it didn’t fit my personality. If I was 14 or 15 years old, my old wannabe-emo self would have loved it. However, at 21 years old, I certainly didn’t. My younger sibling and I agreed that I looked like the sidekick of a villain from an animated Disney Channel series. So, what did I do? Naturally, I went to a grocery store and bought the first box of colour-remover I could get my hands on.

Day 2: 30th of December 2020

I enlisted my mum to help me this time. She dumped the entire box of colour-remover onto my head, wrapped it in a plastic bag and left me to sit with it for an hour. Words cannot describe what that stuff smelt like. Imagine rotten eggs, but warmer and ten times worse. It also made my scalp itch, which must have meant it was working. And work it did! It turns out that colour-remover contains bleach. Who would have thought, right? After rinsing it out, I was left with nasty smelling orange hair. Orange!

I’m lucky to have such kind friends. I was extremely close to cutting off all my hair, but my mum convinced me not to. I’ve now made a rule that I can only make one drastic change to my hair per day.

Day 3: 31st of December 2020

I entered the new year with orange hair. I usually have at least a couple of pictures from the night, but with the disaster on the top of my head, I didn’t feel like being on camera.

Conclusion

You might wonder what my hair looks like now. I’m happy to say the orange have faded a bit. I’m now left with a weird, orange-pink colour. So, if you’re looking for an excuse to do something to your hair, here it is. If everything goes wrong, you can always shave it all off and start over.

• diy
• fail
• failure
• hair
• hair dye
• hair fail