A bit of advice from my hairdyeing friends?

[beetiger]

There's a tiny little wisp of strangeness drifting through me now, and among other things, I seem to want to do something interesting to my hair. Not noticeable from a mile away, but definitely something out of the ordinary.

Therefore, two questions to you who might know:
1)If you do something like a manic panic or special effects dye on unbleached, brown hair, what do you get? Lovely purple(or whatever) highlights? Nothing at all? A muddy purple brown color that looks hideous?

2)Does anyone know of a dye out there that comes out as a raven black with noticeable blue or purple highlights? (Bleaching okay, it's not that I want to avoid bleaching, I just want a more subtle effect than bright purple).

3)If you use a black permanent dye and then use a manic panic or something on top of that once it is done, what do you get?

On a possibly related note, we saw a gang of those retired ladies with the red hats and the purple shirts at the Katonah Museum. I know, I know, it's a social club. But if they're all going to dress alike in their wacky (and very well-composed, despite the color clash) uniforms, meeting perfectly reasonable expectations of what older women do (like go to museums), don't you think they are missing the original point of the poem entirely? I want to see them having a spitting contest in the mall. *Then* I'll be impressed.

Comments

[rm.livejournal.com]

1) Rose Red manic panic will tint brown hair in a dark fuschia. I wouldn't quite call it highlights though.

2) Hydrience's Raven Sunset! Despite what the box said, the purplish highlights will only last about 3 weeks. No bleaching necessary. I love this.

3) not much.

[beetiger.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the specific recommendations! 2) sounds perfect for me -- I think I may go out and look for that one.

[rm.livejournal.com]

It's also one of the gentlest hairdyes I've ever used. It's very black, but will reflect purple when light hits it, and it fades, so you won't have a harsh dye-line if you don't decide to keep redoing it.

[oakenguy.livejournal.com]

*taking notes*

[cktraveler.livejournal.com]

1)If you do something like a manic panic or special effects dye on unbleached, brown hair, what do you get? Lovely purple(or whatever) highlights? Nothing at all? A muddy purple brown color that looks hideous?

I generally get good results by bleaching very light blonde first then applying the color. I've never had the guts to skip that step, but I do know how awful my hair looks when the brown starts to come back in again. :/

If you leave Manic Panic in longer and started with a dark enough color, you get a nice deep shade instead of bright. I did it in the summer and the sun did a great job of lightening it to candy color ... but if you were to do it now that wouldn't be a problem.

If you get a good answer to #2, let me know, since that's the effect I was ACTUALLY trying for. ^_~

[akycha.livejournal.com]

I used a bright green Manic Panic to dye green streaks in my hair once. They came out a gorgeous dark green (I have mid-brown hair, the color my gramma calls "catshit brown").

The green is not very colorfast; I think it all washed out in about a month. I know their blues are not very colorfast at all, although that was a while ago and they may have changed their formulations.

The amusing thing was that when I twisted my hair up to go to work, you could still see the green, but no one at work said a word to me about it. It was like it was invisible. So weird.

[beetiger.livejournal.com]

Huh. This is an idea -- I still have a lot of the green left from when I did my tips last year.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

I have had good results with Herbal Essences Sapphire Black for a raven-black-with-blue-highlights color on my dark brown hair.

Manic Panic OVER said dye is largely unnoticeable on me. I bleach out streaks to take the Vampire Red I love so well.

I am not terribly experienced with Manic Panic on unprocessed brown hair, so I can't offer advice there. My daughter is very, very blonde, and Midnight Blue colors true and clear on her unprocessed hair, although it fades rapidly if not applied thickly enough or not left in for several hours. Leaving the dye in until it's utterly dried is a good move. Her school pictures are in two weeks and we need to discuss if she wants to hasten the fading process and be only blonde in her picture, or if she wants fresh bright streaks. Ah, decisions.

I'd love to see pictures of the end result, whatever you do!

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

Manic Panic + their reds is really intense and I like it. I wish I had a picture of it...I wouldn't call it highlights but it is an intense color.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I say 'go for the fresh streaks'. But then again, I'm someone whose mother actually advised her to freshen the dye in her Special Effects Atomic Pink hair before going to an interview.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

Heh. What sort of job was the interview for?

We've freshened the streaks (originally applied for Warped Tour this summer) for the start of school and for a concert; it's her head, so it's her decision if she wants her school picture to have blue streaks. Oddly, her grandmother (my mother) isn't disturbed by them; she thinks they're cute. My sister-in-law was the one most upset by them, and I think in her case it was because she didn't want to explain to her daughters why THEY couldn't have blue streaks!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

It was, admittedly, an art job. There's a lot of license to have pink hair in a "professional" environment when you're an artist.

[heavenscalyx.livejournal.com]

Oh, your questions make me wish that Pizzazz was still putting out the temporary dyes I used when I was a senior in college. Although I know from then that the purple I liked so much turned my white hairs pink, and with the substantially greater percentage of white hair amidst my dark brown, I suspect that I would look rather more like Utena than I'd like to...

[ladyperegrine.livejournal.com]

When we're old, I'll have spitting contests with you in the mall if you want.

I'll even remove my teeth first.

[creationofme.livejournal.com]

i did black and purple a few months ago,
i odnt really have any pictures left,
but it was black on purple,

(i onyl bleached cause my red was soo dark)
and it came out awosme,
i had purple tones on the underside,
and raveny black hair on hte top (the $6 wally world version blackest black)

im about to go red again (i miss color!)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Hair dye is semi-transparent; my guess on #1 is more to "muddy" than "highlights", I'm afraid. Try it on a little chunk of hair you can afford to cut off if it's horrible, and see what it looks like? Both fresh and after a couple days of showers.

And my guess on #3 is that you'd get highlights.

This is going on knowledge of how the hair dyes behave over each other, and on unbleached black hair; everyone whose hair dying I've been party to has black hair.

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

In other news...

Happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday!

[ayalanya.livejournal.com]

oh! oh! i know this one!

the first question, anyway - wispfox and i both dyed our hair purple using manic panic. mine was amber-ish, hers was light brown.

the dyeing process: http://www.livejournal.com/users/ayalanya/147866.html

how it turned out on wispfox (i thought i had pictures of my hair, but i can't seem to find'em): http://www.livejournal.com/users/wispfox/243660.html#cutid1

and it faded to fuschia on both of us. hers went back to brown (didn't really do an unpleasant muddy thing), and mine got dyed black (which had to be bleached out, twice, and wasn't particularly interesting).