Quarantine Hair: Revisiting Box Dye

Like many of you stuck at home during this coronavirus quarantine, my roots have been growing out. According to my handy-dandy little calendar reminder back when I had plans that weren’t scratched out… 3/31 was when I hit 10 weeks since my last colorist appointment. Which means my roots were driving me CRAZY.

I’ve talked about Overtone before: initial post and 6 month update post. Well, I’ve been doing a mix of colorist appointments and Overtone Vibrant Orange conditioner for the past 2+ years and it’s been working wonderfully to keep me just the right amount of ginger that I like to see in the mirror.

My only complaint about Overtone was that it doesn’t stick to my un-dyed roots, which made my colorist appointments necessary. However, I saw they came out with a new version called “Vibrant Orange for Brown Hair” so I decided to give it a try.

I instagrammed it and gave a mini-review at the time (click the arrow to see all the photos).

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Mini review: Since we are all stuck at home for awhile, I figured it was the perfect time to try out Overtone Orange for Brown Hair. I’ve been using Overtone orange for awhile and was hoping the brown hair version would stick to my roots better. Pic 1 and 2: it is awfully bright on. I saturated my dry hair and left it on for 10 minutes. Pic 3 and 4: close up of roots and hair in sunroom. Pic 5: hair in outside light. The verdict: brighter then I would have liked and no better root coverage than my normal Overtone. I’m curious to see how this fades and think it might be much better in a week. I think I’ll try the new Overtone Ginger next. #overtoneorangeforbrown #overtone

A post shared by pocketfulofjoules (@pocketfulofjoules) on Mar 21, 2020 at 11:29am PDT

Long story short, it still did not stick to my roots. Here they are one week after Overtone in all their 10 week of re-growth glory:

Since we have basically no hope of hair salons opening for another month (at least), I decided that now was the perfect time to try boxed hair dye again. Normally, I’m not the type of person who would be scared of boxed dye. In fact, I dyed my own hair starting at age 15 and did a ton of different colors – red, purple streaks, green streaks, pink streaks, etc.

HOWEVER, 5 years ago I grabbed a box of dye and it straight up ruined my hair. You can read about it and see pictures here: Ginger(ish). The box dye totally messed up my hair to the extent that I had to go to the salon and spend three hours getting the color stripped out, adding in highlights, and then re-adding in an all-over color. It was time consuming and expensive… and I learned my lesson. Ever since then, I’ve let my colorist handle my hair color.

Until now.

I went ahead an added a box of Feria Intense Copper C74 to my Amazon order. It looks awfully orange on the box, but it was the closet to my current spicy ginger I’ve been enjoying. If the color was off, I’d use Overtone again to try to get it where I want it (since it should then stick to the dyed hair).

Also I figured, if it looked horrible, it would probably fade in the weeks/month(s) before I see people. See, quarantine BRIGHT SIDE!

So here we go… I mixed up the dye and sectioned my hair into 4 sections. The dye looks incredibly pastel orange, but I’d already committed at this point. I followed the directions for a ‘touch up’ rather then the full all-over-color job. I saturated my roots for 15 minutes. And then went ahead and added to the color to the rest of my hair and waited 10 more minutes.

Here’s some photos from the process:

In the past, I’ve always erred on the side of leaving the dye on too long. But this time, I tried to slap it in as quickly as possible and keep my timing a little on the light side. So rather than a full 15 minutes to start, I timed myself putting the dye on the roots (which took about 3 minutes) and then just left it on for 12 minutes more or so.

And I somehow got lucky! Because this time the dye did exactly what it was supposed to and blended my roots into the rest of my hair color!

So. Much. Better. And I feel like myself again!

Now, the big question is… will I return to my stylist when this is all over?

Oh, and also welcome to the big reveal of my blog update! I had been having some issues with comments showing up correctly, so I updated the whole look of my blog to fix it. I know change is hard, but do you like it?