“O drama, drama, drama!” wail all the hairs upon my head.
“Oh hush,” I say, “enlightenment is never easy.”
I’ve been dying my hair black for the past two years. I’ve had my dreads for 7 months, and to save on working coloring into the dread itself, I’ve just been applying color to the roots. I felt like a change, and typically when I want a change, I want something dramatically different.
I’ve been thinking about lighter hair in part because I don’t like the way my roots start to show when I have black hair. I have naturally light ash brown hair, and when my hair begins to grow out, it starts to look, on first glance, like I’m developing little bald spots between my dreads. The answer to correcting this would be to dye my roots more often, but being that I only wash my dreads a couple times a week, I feel like depositing more chemicals isn’t so nice.
Meanwhile, I’ve also been quietly obsessing on that silver-white, vaguely lilac-tinted hair for a long time but knowing that to go from black to white would probably result in the death of my dreads altogether, so I talked with a stylist, we decided to proceed with lightening but with the intent to bring me to a sort of strawberry-blond color AND keep all my dreads intact. This would help with the root growth annoyance since my roots would then be darker than the color of the dread. Thus no more “bald spot” effect!
We did a few test strands, one with a color lifter, one with 30 volume beach, and one with 40 volume bleach.
a couple test strands tell us 40 volume is what we want
The next visit was a grueling 4 1/2 hours of chemicals, chemicals, chemicals. Although, to be fair, we spent probably a good 45 minutes to an hour popping string off the roots of all my many dreads from the maintenance I had done a month or so ago. Then on chemicals!
We actually ended up doing all of this in the area with the sinks, so there was no mirror for me to see what was going on. I had to wait till the very end when we went back upstairs, and wow!
Before:
black dreadies
After:
gold dreadies!
Oh, I’d been worried that my dreads might come loose with all the scrubbing and abuse, but I think the damage from the bleach actually made them lock up tighter. Nice!
