So if you follow me on Instagram stories you saw this whole debacle unfold about 3 weeks ago. Here’s the story (nightmare) of my most recent trip to the hair salon.
The day I was flying out to California for a little family reunion I headed into the hair salon to get a quick root touch-up. For as long as I can remember I have always gotten partial highlights and a trim. This time my stylist wanted to add in a little color to the ends of the bottom half of my hair to blend everything together. She also toned me with an ashy color. I don’t realllly know these hair terms, but this is what we discussed. My natural color is a dirty/ashy blonde so that was the reasoning behind an ashy toner. Prior to this stylist I rarely got my hair toned. I love the whole golden and brassy blonde look— and after this I’ll be extremely careful when it comes to letting anyone tone my hair.
I don’t want to get into bashing my salon or hair stylist, so I’m leaving names out of this. I’m not sure what went wrong but I didn’t notice anything until I got into the car, probably because I was rushing out of there to head straight to the airport. I was at a stoplight when I looked down and saw this strip of hair that was stark white. Minor heart attack… Then I got to a mirror and realized my hair was overly bleached and then at closer glance everything looked totally grey and purple. It was bad!!!! You know it’s bad when your dad notices it. This picture is from the airport and you can’t really tell, but this is the only evidence I have from the debacle.
Notice the hat….ha ha. I was not about to show this hair to anyone!
My main concern, above and beyond the color issue, was the fact that my hair looked so fried and felt like straw. My hair is my baby and I was so disappointed that my hard work caring for it had all gone to shit. I cried from the car all the way onto the plane…. my parents wanted to kill me. I called my aunt from the plane, who lives in California, and asked her if she could get me in with someone first thing the next morning to try and fix my hair before the weekend full of events and pictures. I was not about to go the whole weekend with grey hair. Nope.
The next morning I got into an AMAZING hair salon in Manhattan Beach, Hush Hush Hair Salon, and here’s what the stylist did to help fix my hair. Hopefully these tips can help someone in the future if something similar happens to them.
The stylist first put a gloss on my hair (not sure what that means) but he said he really didn’t want to add more color because of the damage my hair had already gone through. Then he washed that out and put a Shu Uemura conditioner that brings out golds in blondes, kind of like the opposite of purple conditioner. He left the conditioner on for about 5 minutes. Those two things crazy helped my hair color, so I left the salon looking a little better than before. From then on I’ve been sleeping in hair masks, continuing use of the gold Shu conditioner (2 times a week) and I stopped using heat products as much as I can!
Let me end this by saying, I completely understand that this is not a really tragic event and much worse things are happening on every corner, every day. I can already picture people messaging me telling me I’m being overly dramatic, so I want you to know I’m fully aware that I probably didn’t need to cry for two hours straight… but hey, that’s me! I’ve always been a crier and it’s not going to end anytime soon.
