Journey to Rose Gold/Blonde Hair

Are you guys with me or not on this new hair goal?

My obsession has officially taken me on a whole different level

I often do my hair myself, only at times that I go to Europe I let a hair dresser touch my hair. (No offence to anywhere else around the world). I just feel like places that deal with more darker hair colors tend to know more about how to handle and lighten them. Coming from Turkish roots, I have dark brown hair and its always been a mission to go blonde. BUT that has never been a reason to give up on my dream blonde hair. Although I have been through some very interesting colors in the progress. If I list the amount of times that I've gone from brown-to-blonde then back from blonde-to-brown, I'd probably give you all a headache! For many years I been going back and forth, which I believe gives me enough confidence to write and give some self-taught advice. 

A little note; please keep in mind that I'm not a professional or a hair expert and my advice is given only based on my own experiences.

First I wanna get you all familiar with the lingo!

Level: A level is the numeric part of the color. Levels normally go from 1-12, 1 being the darkest (black) and 12 being the high lift (platinum)

Tone: A tone is the character of the color result, its the one or two letters that follow the level number 

Tones: N-Natural/Neutral, A-Ash, G-Gold, W-Warm, R-Red, C-Cool, V-Violet - sometimes there can be a secondary tone involved, for example "NG" which would be "Neutral Gold" base.

Volume developer: think of the volume of your developer as the amount of lift or lightening you want to get because volume peroxide is what opens up your hair for the color to deposit in. The higher the volume, the more it opens up. Volumes range from 10-50 (50 being insanely high and is not recommended, but been there done that and thats a whole other story).

My hair was at a number 5N on roots and 7A on tips. 

My goal was a 10GV - 10 being lightest blonde. GV being Gold Violet base. 10GV is a Honey Beige Blonde with a light pink hue. I wanted it bit more pink then the results this color would give so I also used L'Oreal Feria Smokey Pink as my last step. 

My go-to hair dying product brand is without question - Wella. 

I like Wella's Color Charm Permanent Liquid Hair Color. My main reason for liking this line is cause its a liquid formula. When you're doing your hair yourself, you wanna get that salon look. With cream colors, its hard to absorb and blend in the dye evenly. With a liquid formula, it easily blends in and absorbs evenly. Its a lot easier and you don't have to apply it in a billion sections to make sure you get your whole head covered. 

STEP 1

My first step was, what I call breaking the ice. Its where I soften my dark brown roots before bleaching. The goal here was to lift my brown roots to a 6N-7N shade, which is somewhere between a dark-medium blonde. For this I chose to use 8A which is a light ash blonde. Now, I knew it wasn't going to turn out a light ash blonde with no bleaching involved, but the goal was to soften my dark brown down to a dark/medium blonde. And to do this step its best to use an ash base tone. The results gave me unwanted brass, which was expected cause we are lifting. But that is why we have toners and I picked T35 (Imperial Beige) to tone the brass down. I first dyed my hair with 8A mixed with 40 volume developer (keep in mind the higher you lift the more brass you will get because you are lifting your hair, so seeing brass was very much normal to my eyes) I then toned the unwanted brass with T35 toner with a 20 volume developer. I chose the toner in Imperial Beige, because I needed to stay close to beige tones as possible as beige has a pink undertone.

Ratio used for the mix is 1:2 

For example, 1 bottle of hair color would be 2 bottles of developer (you can easily measure this by using the bottle you have for the hair color, just fill the same bottle twice with developer into your mix.) 

I let my hair wait 3 days like this before bleaching, just to calm my scalp and let it rest a bit.

STEP 2

Bleaching. I bleached my roots to an orange level. I used Clairol Nice'n'Easy Born Blonde Maxi Blonding Kit. This kit is for Dark Blonde to Black hair. Its very effective. I've used it before and I like to use this bleaching kit whenever I'm lightening my hair. If I'm going for a hair dye from my local drugstore, I only go for Clairol's Nice'n'Easy line. Its a liquefied formula just like Wella's Color Charm. I know with hair dye's from the drugstore you don't always get the results as it shows on the box. But with Clairol's Nice'n'Easy line, I've always gotten the results shown. But because I have thick and long hair, it costs me less to purchase Wella then buying 2-3 boxes from the drugstore for each step.

However, I should have let this process go for a little bit longer. I didn't use the developer the kit comes with because I wanted a higher lift. So I used a 40 volume developer to lift and I also mixed in Wella's 10GV Honey Beige color dye instead of the color dye included in the kit. (The color included in the kit is to reach more of a platinum blonde). I pretty much used this kit for lightening powder (bleach). I also did not want to leave it in for more than 20 minutes. If I had left it for 30 minutes, I would have gotten a yellow level blonde with brass, which could have ended me with better results after applying pink but I wanted to play safe and did not want to lighten it too much. After the bleaching, I applied Wella's T18 Lightest Ash Blonde (previously called "White Lady") toner, with a 10 volume developer to help mute away the orangeness.

STEP 3

Final step!! Woo-hoo!!
For my final step I used L'Oreal Feria Smokey Pink. To be honest, I'm a little on the edge with this dye. I'm not a fan of L'Oreal products..but, Clairol doesn't have a pink dye so I had to go with L'Oreal. This dye didn't give me the pink I wanted on my tips, but it gave me an actual Rose-Gold on my roots. If I had lightened to a yellow level blonde, my root results would have been similar to my tips. (For anyone using my steps, you can keep that in mind depending on the result level that you want.)

I wish it gave more of a pink result on my tips, but then again maybe too pink would not have been good for everyday use. I used everything the box came with this time, I didn't mix and match with my own products and ways. I feel like this is going to wash away and leave me with a beige blonde.

Either way I'm happy with my results and enjoying my new-hair new-me mode.
Hope you guys had fun going through my step by step to a Rose Gold/Blonde Hair and if you have any questions don't hesitate to ask (: