First of all, let me tell you glamistas, this is no hair-friendly territory. If you are sensitive to hair suffering and/or want advice on how to get your mane to shine like a unicorn’s, then I am afraid you won’t find solace in this post –but maybe in upcoming ones! 😉

To put you in context, I have spent all my life with my natural dark brown bangs –that time I had henna doesn’t really count as its effects were negligible. Last winter I decided it was about time I did something crazy to change my look radically. And what was the answer to the winter crisis I was clearly going through at that moment? You guessed it, choosing one of the most difficult hair colours to achieve artificially: GREY!

My hairdresser expressed some concerns after hearing the idea, as due to my dark base we would need to lighten my hair about a million levels, and it would suffer. Like a lot. But despite me being a very undecided person, you must know that once I make up my mind, there is no turning back, and me getting my dreamy silver hair was not a trendy whim but a long-time-considered and carefully-researched decision, so I was not going to give up so easily, especially when the whole of the Internet was conspiring for me to fulfil this dream! See below:

Finally, after reading a trillion blogs on the Internet and watching all the available YouTube tutorials on how to get the perfect granny hair, we set out for the adventure, my hairdresser and I!

It was a long and laborious afternoon: two rounds of bleaching, me looking as Lucius Malfoy with dark eyebrows, me second-guessing half of my life decisions, us realising there was no way out, just colouring forward! 🙂

After the bleaching, we toned the persisting brassiness using Wella’s Colour Charm #T18 Lightest Ash Blonde, a toner that is supposed to leave a snowy white tint and remove any rogue orangy undertones that could still be present after bleaching dark hair. It sort of did that…

Five hours after the start of the session, we got to apply the grey colouring, hooray! We had chosen a steely grey with blue undertones which looked really nice on the sample and package. However, turns out the blue tones were not really undertones and after applying the dye, I ended up with a patchy blue-blondish bob that didn’t look exactly how I had pictured it in my mind… 🙁  I was gutted, but no one said it would be easy, and I was determined to succeed!

When I arrived home that day, I washed my hair lightly to tone down the colour and obtained a cute white hair with blue hues that my colleagues were still shocked to see but accepted as the radical change I was going for. Shorter than having to explain that my makeover experiment hadn’t turned out quite as expected, uhm…

A month later, I came back to my salon and this time round we only had to bleach the roots and instead of the steely blue dye, we went for the Wella’s Colour Charm #T18 and then applied a second toner, Wella’s Colour Charm #050 Cooling Violet. The magic combination of the two semi-permanent dyes got me a gorgeous dark grey with purple undertones which I fell in love with instantly.

50 Shades of Grey (G-rated) visually explained (excuse the pre-iPhone era pics!)

And that’s it, lovely peeps! That’s the story of how I got my granny hair 🙂

To this day, I am still a young lady with sometimes-silvery-sometimes-blondish-hair that doesn’t regret the crazy decision made but that would appreciate enormously if grey was an easier colour. I believe this colour looks gorgeous and different, and I have managed to restore part of the inflicted damage (Dear hair, hope you can forgive me one day…) but I won’t lie to you: it is pretty hard to achieve and maintain! –more on that on a separate post 😉

What is the craziest thing you have done to change your look? Let me know in the comments!

Lots of silvery love,

Saida