A bad experience with the L'Oreal Preference hair dye.

Hello Everyone!

I'll be talking about a few different hair products in this post. I'll start off by saying that my views aren't going to be particularly positive. I'm not going to lie, I haven't had the best experience with these items so I thought I'd let you all know my story.

I intended to be writing a review on only the L'Oreal Preference hair dye in Shade 1, but that's not turned out to be the case, I'll also be talking about the Jerome Russell B Blonde High Lift powder bleach kit and also the Clairol Nice 'n Easy in the shade light brown. 

Can you see where we're going with this yet?

I picked this L'Oreal blonde kit for my mum, I didn't use these items on my own hair. I'd heard really good reviews on it, seen the adverts on TV and having never dyed hair myself at home before, other than when I had purple ends, I didn't really know where to start. This just looked like a good all-rounder. 

I took the above picture when I first bought the kit thinking I'd just be reviewing the one thing and it'd all go smoothly. I was so wrong. But that's what you receive in the kit regardless. One thing I do like about the dye kits is that they come with a conditioner to apply afterwards which I didn't expect. 

Anyway, I mixed the different solutions together, followed the instructions, sectioned the hair and started applying it. Left it for 40 minutes and washed it off. 

It was bright orange. 

I've never been so horrified in my life. Aside from when the hair dresser turned my hair green. To be fair, my mum didn't freak out or anything so she needs applauding for that. After the orange hair I went and bought another of the same kit and put it on again. Thinking back now, I suppose this was a stupid thing to do, as the orange parts went even more orange and the blonde bits went white. It was really bad. But we dried it off hoping that would made the orange look paler and it did but it was still plainly obvious. My poor mother had to go to work the next day with her hair like this. Bear in mind that the underneath of her hair was still brown as she only wanted the top half lifting. A certain McFly song springs to mind here...

The next day, we went back to morrisons and bought this bleach kit which a friend recommended. If I was ever going to but blonde through someone's hair again (unlikely) I'd definitely just go straight for the bleach, you're far less likely to mess it up if you use it correctly and keep your eye on it. 

You have to buy the box which comes with 3 powder sachets and the bottle of peroxide separately. One bottle to one sachet ratio. It's a good thing I'm kind of on the ball because if you were completely clueless you'd probably just pick up the box.  

We went home and applied this to all the orange and we were advised to leave this on for 40 minutes. When it had been washed off, it was bright white. The below picture shows what it looked like dry.  

It looked really ridiculous, she could have lit up the street like a lamp post, it was that bright. It looked better what it was orange if I'm being honest. The only thing I can suggest that made it go so bright was the time we left it on. Only, if we hadn't left it on that long it would have still been orange. It was a vicious circle. 

In a last attempt before going to the hair dressers (try getting an appointment this time of year for something so time consuming... you'd be lucky) I picked up this 'light brown' dye. They were on 2 for £10. I took the above picture to show mum as she wouldn't go to Morrisons with me hahaha. 

I applied this to all of her hair, even the underneath which I hadn't touched and left it on for about 30 minutes. It washed off and the colour had totally masked the bright blonde and orange. The colour would have probably gone darker had it not been put on top of something so light but the colour it turned out is actually really nice. 

So, moral of the story: don't dye your hair with a box dye if you don't know what you're really doing (particularly the roots). Use bleach over dye if you want blonde, it'll probably turn out better. Just go to the hairdressers because if it turns out wrong, it'll cost you just as much to correct it!

Have you ever had a hair disaster? 

Thanks for reading, 

Leanne x

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P.S. I even tweeted L'Oreal about the problem and they had the cheek to not reply! That's the whole reason for Twitter and social networking! Very annoying!