If you follow me on Instagram or Twitter you will have already seen recent selfies of me with my new rose-gold, pinky peachy hair. I've been wanting to go this colour for months and months, and fawning over images of pretty metallic hair on Pinterest while I mulled it over. I finally committed to the process (and shelled out around £100 all in all - becoming a unicorn ain't cheap) and I am sooooo happy I did. Here's how the magic happened.
What I Started With: Before I began, I had waist-length, auburn hair. It had been tinted with semi-permanent dyes many months ago, and had a lot of virgin roots. It was quite strong and healthy, despite being in desperate need of a trim, and I felt confident it could withstand a bleaching.
The Bleach: I decided to go to a professional salon rather than bleaching it myself, because the kind of blonde that I wanted was a warm, natural-looking blonde - a golden canvas for temporary rose, peach, and pinky dyes that I could play around with to make something quite deep and metallic. So I booked in to Bauhaus in Cardiff, where they use Aveda products - my favourite. They gave me an all over bleach with a stronger solution on my ends. At this point you will look like a CheeseString, until they tone your hair. They gave me several rounds of ash and natural toner until it was all a consistent colour (check out this selfie to see what I looked like).
The Rose Gold Tint: I started with one bottle of Rose dye from Bleach London (their products are all vegan and cruelty-free). I originally planned to mix Rose and Awkward Peach, but I had enough warm, peachy tones in my hair to be getting on with, so all I needed were cooler pink tones. With the first half of the dye I followed the instructions on the bottle and put it on towel-dried hair for 15 mintues, but after I did this, there was next to no colour on my hair. So I did a little strand test on DRY hair, which I left on for a couple of hours. The strand came out a beautiful, bright metallic pink. Happy with the strand, I went ahead and used the last of the bottle on completely dry hair, left it on for about one hour and a quarter, and then rinsed off the excess. I did not rinse until the water ran clear, like you would with regular dye, because that would literally leave no colour on you at all. When I was done I dried my hair with a black towel to avoid any stains getting anywhere!
And that's about it. You can see what I looked like immediately afterwards in this picture, and after a few washes, the colour fades to peach, ginger (like this) and then rosy blonde. If you have any questions about going rose-gold then please pop me a comment!
