Finally came up with a plan for my hair

So in my process to transition back to natural the past months have been difficult. After bleaching my hair several times it became lighter, but still not light enough to match my natural color. The disparity between the color treated hair and my natural color is too high.

I did try to color my hair with 10G a while back but the color didn’t take. That kind of made me despondent. Since then I’ve used this spray-in color which is not ideal but is better than nothing. Still I can say that my self-esteem regarding my hair over the past few months is lower than it’s ever been in my life. I guess I kind of just got tired of it. I know that’s not the best attidute, but I’ve had so many other intense stresses occuring in my life and this was just one more thing.

Anyhow I went back to the beauty store a few days ago and got some 9G. I’m getting ready to do a treatment as soon as my hair dries (my hair usually takes forever to dry and no I never ever use a blow dryer).

I have thought about trying to lighten the hair further with bleach, but honestly using bleach scares the crap out of me. I don’t want to seriously damage my hair or have it melt away. So my plan is to color the uncolored part – which is now a few inches long! (kind of cool). It will hopefully be in between my natural color and the existing color. This then will enable my hair to transition more smoothly to natural later on by decreasing the contrast at the junction between the treated and untreated hair. Good plan!

UPDATE

Well, so here’s my update. This morning I applied 9G color but I also decided to add some drops of this cover grey stuff which is supposed to help the color cover grey. It says to use 10 drops per ounce of color. I used 2 oz. of color (before mixing with developer) so I put in 20 drops. I noticed that the cover grey is a strong orangish-brown color. I was thinking “Why am I adding this?” as I added it, but just went ahead with it. I started to apply it to the roots but inadvertandly a little bit of it got on other parts of my hair – the area where the color is so hard to remove – and that area just sucked the color up. It was almost instant.

I found out that this is called “grabbing”. Certain parts of my hair are prone to grabbing, while other parts – the roots – are extremely resistant to color. So I kind of fucked up my hair. But I didn’t panic.

I also noticed that after this treatment my hair was a lot less brassy and more neutral. That seemed like a positive thing. So I went back to the beauty store and got some 9N color – the natural series. I went home and did another treatment of the roots with the 9N. Then later this evening I did a color remover treatment on the dark areas. Color remover treatment is not that powerful – it’s not like bleaching and is more gentle. You leave it in for 20 minutes than then have to wash 3x, rinse for 5 minutes, and wash again 3x.

Did it help? Perhaps slightly. I guess my hair is better now than this morning when I started, but it’s still not where I want it.

So I decided to stop at this point and wait a few days. The roots are definitely not was white as before. But the fact that the part of my hair I wanted to lighten actually grabbed color and got slightly darker is kind of unfortunately.

But yes, I think overall I’m happy with the way it’s progressing. Am now thinking of bleaching the dark areas in a few days.