The Bluest Butterfly asked me:

Since you are into self portraits…could you post photos of your different hairdos over the years?
I don’t understand how people get those streaks in there hair…like you have in the blog for a year contest photo. Could you do a post about how to put steaks in your hair?

These pictures are in lieu of Self Portrait Sunday as this will post on Sunday, and we’re very busy this weekend as my husband’s family are in town. We’re doing inheritance things, dividing certain things up while his mother is still alive, because she wants to be able to tell us all stories about where various things came from and why/if she wants them to stay in the family. It’s sad, but also refreshing, in some ways because my husband and his brother get along very well, so unlike I’ve seen with some branches of my own family and heard with other people’s families there’s none of that nasty back-stabbing or bickering going on about who gets what.

Anyway on with the pictures of my hair:

This is the last time my hair was at it’s original color.
It’s my 1995 (Year 11) high school portrait, taken just a few months before we emigrated, probably that October if I remember how they used to do school pictures properly.
It’s also the shortest that my hair was for a while, because I started the “will grow hair out as long as possible” project after it was cut off that previous August. As I came to really regret cutting it short. That lasted until about 2001 when my hair was so traumatized because of the various ways I dyed it in college (which I unfortunately don’t have pictures of all of them) that I had to cut it off again, and was then growing it out until this past April when I cut it all off by my own choice, this time.

So, on with the show.
1. 1997, me in my hippie phase with my first car.
2. Summer 1998 or 1999, home from college, early dye experiments with “Chocolate Cherry” shade. Self-dyeing, or dyeing by room mates at that point with OTC products.
3. This was after my hair was recovering from being killed, mutilated and over-dyed. Mum paid for she and I to get glamor portraits done. That was when I was streaking it for the first time.
4. More of the streaking, just going brighter shades of red. It was the wildest I could get away with at work, given I worked for a library (government) and couldn’t do purples or blues without getting reprimanded.

1. 2.
3. 4. The “straight streaks” are done by dyeing the hair one color and then threading certain parts of it through a cap, and bleaching them out, or dyeing the darker, depending on how you want to do it. Other times my hair dresser has wrapped portions of my hair in tin foil and pasted them with the alternate colors of dye and then rolled them up on my head to “cure” before rinsing it all out and drying it off. It really depends on how thick I want the strips to be, and probably varies from stylist to stylist depending on how they prefer to operate.

At some point in between the streaks and the red/purple. I had my hair just RED; but I can’t find any shots of that now :-p

When I did my hair purple and red however, like the “Blog of the Year” pictures, or as shown in these two shots:

That was done by dividing my hair into three sections, one for each of the front red pieces, and one for the main purple portion. The front red pieces were done in the tin foil while the rest was dyed with the purple mix.

If I’m dyeing my hair now I pay my stylist to do it. After the mess that my hair wound up college, so horrendously damaged that we had to chop it all off…a good foot of hair; I’m so scared to try anything by myself now that I will only go to the salon to get it done. Thankfully I have a very cool stylist, who loves when I go in and go, “You know, I think I want my hair purple today,” she goes, “OMG GREAT. I’ve always wanted to dye someone’s hair purple!!” rather than looking at me like I have five heads, as other stylists I’ve gone to have done.

I miss having the whacky colors. Next time I go, and I’m really overdue because my short hair is getting to the point where it’s unruly and I have to wear an alice band to keep it out of my eyes I’m going to do purple and red again. I keep thinking I might want to get some blue streaks in the purple, but I don’t know. Blue doesn’t last as long in hair because it’s an “unnatural base shade”. That also means that when it starts to fade out it will fade out to grey rather auburn as the purple has (which you can see by looking at my regular Self Portrait Sunday Photos.

I have other means at my disposal if I want a quick change with my hair; because I used to cosplay I have a couple of wigs at my disposal. My long red wig can get very hot to wear, but I love the shade. The blue one is actually a lot easier to wear now that my hair is short, because I don’t have to braid my hair into about six-twelve braids, wrap it on my head, pin it and then put the wig cap and wig on:

Also, from time to time I will digitally alter the pictures. Some of my readers may have seen the glamor shot picture before, but more likely in this format:

I was disappointed that I didn’t have any pictures from my hair being blue in college, so I altered the glamor shot to the appropriate shade and have used it around and about as a self-icon before.Okay, so there we are. Hopefully once my husband’s family goes back up North I’ll be able to have some time to go to the salon. It gets awkward, because I don’t want to take the munchkin with me, because asking him to sit and behave that long at his age is nigh on impossible, but there aren’t so many people who can babysit him during the week, when I’ve liked to go, as they all work during the week, during the day. Tends to happen that I book a hair appointment and my husband’s chief schedules a meeting for that afternoon, and hubbie can’t really take the munchkin to meetings.

Ah, well, we’ll sort something out.