I highlighted my hair last night. I’d bought the box last week, but kept thinking of growing out bad haircolor and kept delaying. Then, after everyone else went to bed last night, as I was sitting knitting a scarf and watching Red Cap on BBC, I noticed that every female on the show had lovely highlights, and it occured to me that I could always go to a hairdresser for some low lights to help it grow out better.

So into the bathroom I went, after putting on an old shirt, and I busted into my box of Feria for brown hair and went for it.

It was cold in the house last night, so the product closest to my scalp (and therefore body heat) worked the best and the fastest. The stuff at the ends barely lightened my hair at all.

Additionally, I used the weird little product applicator brush thingy (it looks like a cross between a mutant toothbrush and a mutant hairbrush) and it basically left blobs everywhere. This is why I have a giant, weird-looking BLONDE!!! patch on my right temple.

The stuff’s supposed to stay on for 30 to 45 minutes, but after observing my remarkably mediocre application I figured it would be better just to wash it out. But first I needed to get the left side of my head (I’d started on the right) to lighten up a little, so I wrapped my head in a plastic bag and slapped a hot washcloth on the left to heat it up for a few minutes.

Then I got a towel and some shampoo and the conditioner that came with the kit and washed my hair in the sink.

As I’d blown my hair drier of twelve years up last Friday, I had to wait for it to air dry. Then I noticed that it was much blonder than I’d expected after only leaving it on for twenty minutes, that I’d actually not done too bad a job achieving the “chunky” look I was after (on the right side of my head, at least!), and that I liked the reddish-bronze color the highlighted sections had become.

All in all, not a terribly bad hair catastrophe! It’s obviously done-at-home-from-a-box, and it’s obvious I didn’t have the sense to have a girlfriend apply it for me, and it’s obvious that it was way too cold in my house to work properly, but in the final analysis I have some big fat chunks of lighter hair all over my head. If you don’t look too close it kinda turned out okay.

This is what I want to know: why can’t you buy bottles of the conditioner they put in hair color kits seperately? It’s the best, silkiest, most wonderfully effective conditioner in the world, but you can only get it in color kits. I think this is bizarre. Obviously they know how to make a super-conditioner, so why won’t the sell it? Even if you can only use it once a week or twice a month, people would still buy it because it rocks!