Recently I’ve had the niggling urge to change something about myself and my first thoughts were of changing my hair colour. When I went out looking for a way to do this without damaging my hair I stumbled upon Lush’s blocks of henna. Henna is a natural dye and the brilliant thing about it is when you use it on your hair it coats the hair making it look and feel thicker and it doesn’t fade. Lush’s blocks of henna also contain ingredients like cocoa butter so that when you go about dying your hair the process acts as an intensive conditioning treatment as well.
After reading about it I wanted to give it a go, but at the same time I didn’t want bright ginger hair, so I was glad to find out that Lush’s henna comes in a choice of four colours; a ginger, a red-brown, a glossy brown, and a dark brown (almost black). I decided to mix the ginger henna (Caca Rouge) with the red-brown henna (Caca Marron) to aim towards a red-auburn colour as my hair is naturally a mid-brown shade.
You buy Lush’s henna in blocks of 6, I bought both Caca Rouge and Caca Marron for £7.95 each, but these provided a full head of hair colour plus one to two future root touch ups. For my mid-length hair I was recommended to use 6 blocks for my first application, I used 4 blocks of Caca Rouge and 2 blocks of Caca Marron (both pictured above).
You have to prepare henna before using it. First you have to cut it up into smaller chunks, then you put on the plastic gloves Lush provide you with and then you heat the chunks up as you might melt chocolate- in a glass bowl over a saucepan of water.
As it heats up, you dribble water onto the chunks of henna and slowly it takes on the consistency of a paste. You then literally just let the henna paste cool down a little before applying it directly to your hair; I started from the bottom layer of my hair working upwards. I’m not going to lie, this bit was messy. I got henna paste all over me and all over my bath (I had the foresight to take the henna into the bathroom). It smelled really weird, it felt really weird and when I’d finished I’d been told to wrap my hair in cling film as this would help the red tone ‘take’ to my hair, so I definitely looked really weird! I left this weird mixture on my head for about 12 hours sleeping with it on overnight, very cautiously wrapped up in cling film with a towel over my pillow for good measure!
When I woke up and managed to get it all out of my hair, it does take some doing, I hurriedly blow dried it and could already tell that it felt thicker and softer. The colour, however, took about 3 days to develop (for me anyway) and after day 3 it was noticeably more red than the day after I applied it.
Overall, I’ve loved my experience with Lush’s henna, I can really tell the difference in the quality of my hair after using this and I love the colour. I’ve found a way to change my hair colour and treat it well, and it’s a process I’d highly recommend!