Hair Today

I haven't had my hair cut professionally for years, and I have NEVER had it coloured professionally despite the fact I haven't seen my natural colour since I was 15! It has been various shades over the years, from goth black to vibrant red and just about everything in between. I didn't have the luxury, as a teenager, of the fantastic range of colours my daughters enjoy today (think pink, purple, blue, green, you name it, they've tried it) but I did pretty well. I didn't like my natural colour very much and rather derisively described it as 'dead rat brown' if anyone asked, but these days I'm honest enough to admit that I dye it simply to hide the grey.

It's not that I mind grey hair, I don't have a problem with getting older - it comes to all of us in the end - and if I were to wake up one morning to find my hair a uniform silvery colour I don't think I'd mind too much. It's this inbetweeny stage I don't like, those random grey hairs that streak the brown in a disorderly fashion. Maybe one day, when the grey outweighs the dark, I'll give up on the dye but until then I'll spend a few pounds every 6 weeks or so in the name of vanity.

Money has been a bit tighter of late and hair dye was something that kept getting pushed off the bottom of my list. I like my hair to look OK, but when it comes right down to it I'm not so vane that I'm going to skimp on food or electricity for the sake of doing my roots and so it was that those roots got longer and longer and the grey more and more obvious and that didn't make me very happy at all. I felt I couldn't really justify spending money out on dye but when it started to make me miserable...

 

 

.... that 2" stripe of grey down the middle of my head had to go!

 

I've never really bothered with the more expensive hair colours you find on the shelves these days unless they are on offer, I usually spend about £4 or £5, and to be honest I've not noticed any real difference in quality regardless of price...except perhaps that the cheaper ones don't smell as nice but are often better at covering grey.

 

This time I couldn't afford my usual colour but the sinking feeling I got each morning when I looked in the mirror prompted me to give one I found in Poundland a go. I wasn't really expecting much, not for a pound. The colour wasn't as rich, or red, as I'd have liked but I thought 'what the heck? It will cover my grey and if I can afford a decent colour in a couple of weeks I can always do it again.'

And this was the result.

 

 

It's a bit darker than I wanted. It looks OK in the sun, or under bright lights, but on a dull day -to my eyes- it looks almost black and my goth days are long gone! lol

 

It'll do, I thought, until I can get something better. But then I realised how soft it felt, how silky smooth....was this really my hair??? And then, without any prompting, hubby said how much he liked the colour, how it really suited me!

 

So now there are three boxes of pound shop hair dye sitting in my cupboard, and I shall stock up on a couple more next week. No more grey roots for me.

 

Now, I just have to take about an inch of dead ends off and it'll look just as good as the days when I used to sip G&T's in a salon in Covent Garden as a glamourous stylist snipped and smoothed my locks for almost £100 of my hard earned cash!

 

£1 or £100? It's an easy choice.