DIY Hair Repair Masks

Soooo ladies and gents....I did something very stupid. I dyed my hair. And now it's in shambles.

To back up a step, the week before Easter I decided I had had it with my hair:

(My natural color--virgin/uncolored)

...and came up with a brilliant plan to go dark:

(The three inspiration photos I gave my new stylist)

I went to a nearby salon that boasted '100% organic' hair dye....should've been suspicious from that alone, but I thought I'd give it a whirl:

(Excuse the early-morning, makeup-free pic)

Needless to say, not only was the dye NOT organic.....it was horrible.  It started out dark enough, but within a week it had faded to a light, light, brown, almost dirty dirty blonde.

Then I went to the desert for the weekend, and it went full-on BRASSY.

So I stopped by the salon again to get the chick to fix it. "Remove the brassy tones, please," I said. She must have heard, "Turn my hair into an 80s bleach-blonde nightmare, please," because this was the result:

(again....early morning, steam from my shower ;)

Sooooo I now have bleached-blonde hair that will take months of coloring to get back to a normal person's hair color, PLUS my hair is FRIED.  Like...crispy, straw-like, snapping off FRIED. Needless to say, I'm not a happy camper and wish I had just never dyed my hair to begin with (grass is always greener, right?).

I had a consultation with a stylist that my friend loves yesterday (I'll NEVER go back to the other salon), who thinks she can salvage this shit, but it will take lots more dye jobs to get it to a point where I can eventually grow out the dye without having obvious nasty roots from my natural color. Before I do that, though, I want to get my hair healthier so I'm more comfortable that another dye job won't make my hair fall out...

So I went to the interwebs for DIY natural hair masks, and I whipped up these little ditties over the weekend:

DIY Hair Mask Recipes by mjchirpich-1 featuring a haircare

The Intensive Hair Repair Mask recipe is pretty heavy-duty, and it WORKS. I plan to do this once a week until my next dye job. I just mixed all the ingredients together with a spoon and slathered it all over my hair. I left it on for about 45 minutes then shampooed it out with my favorite Acure shampoo. Be careful not to use too hot of water, though--it could cook the egg! It took 2 rounds of shampoo to get this out, but afterward my hair was not the least bit greasy or weighed-down, which is saying something because virtually all hair products make my fine hair greasy and limp!

The next day, my hair was so much softer and more manageable--my boyfriend even asked what I did because it looked so much better! The benefits lasted about 2 days and then I could feel my bleached hair returning to its crispy ways (although still not as bad as before the mask!)

So, that night I made up the DIY Conditioning Hair Mask--I just mixed together almond oil and sea buckthorn oil in my palms and applied it all over my hair. I left it on overnight (do it on a night that you're not going anywhere, because it WILL make your hair look greasy) and washed it out with my normal Acure shampoo/conditioner. My hair is once again soft and manageable, but I will say it's not as soft as after the repair mask--I'll have to do that again soon.

So here are some inspiration images segue my hair light-light-light to more like my natural color:


My hair is about this light, but much more gold--I want some ashy lowlights to cool it down.





 


So hopefully between my two DIY masks and reducing heat (less blow drying/flat ironing), I'll get my hair back to a place where I can start the long process of dyeing it back to closer to my natural color.

What are your best tips and tricks for when you do utterly stupid things to your hair??

All images my own (selfies, obvs ;) or available from my Hairstyles Pinterest board.