New year - new hair

Or: giving up on bleaching!!

There comes a time in every person´s life where they want to try and pull off blonde hair. There also comes another time where this decision seems not as important as initially was...

I have been a blonde for the past year and a half.
I was so eager to get long, blonde hair that I loved to ignore how bleaching actually damaged it. This is the first reason for changing it.

The other reason turned out to be a lot deeper than I thought. Sharing older pictures here in the "blast from the past" post series made me look at old pictures of myself, and I realized that my best look was when I was in high school: fringe + long natural hair. Back then I just didn´t know what to do with it.
I was so determined to changed the way I naturally look like that it made me underrate my natural beauty, which I am sort of denying enough by putting my cat-eyeliner every day and changing the shape of my eyes...
I have stopped doing that lately and did this brown-eyeshadow stuff instead, as on the picture below. I quite like it. I haven´t changed my everyday exaggerated cat-eyeliner in 3 years.

before

And so, after a year and a half of (quite successfully) growing out my hair, I have decided to cut it, as a first step for ridding off the blonde.

I had 2 layers in my hair, and asked the hairdresser to even it with the highest layer. I then asked her to make me a fringe, because fringe is who I am. I grew up with it, and I can´t live without it (frankly because of practical purposes. Can´t stand hair strands falling of my face, it makes me very angry up to the point of thinking about homicide).

after haircut

But I didn´t stop there. I have decided to give Henna another try, since I liked it so much the first time I did it in December 2013. I bleached it over at the time since I was determined to get bright hair. But this time is different. I do want to get the blonde out and change how it looks, and I might as well do that while enjoying this very nice intense orange:

after henna!

So what´s the plan? Enjoy this color, and to cut my fringe regularly until it will be all natural hair. I will continue coloring my natural hair with orange Henna, since I would love to add an orange tint to it.

So what did I learn of this?

• I could rock blonde hair, I looked awesome in it, despite unprofessional bleaching ;)
  
• Blonde hair is a great color to have on short till shoulder length hair. The longer the bleached hair is, the more breakable and damaged it is. Blonde hair is great for people with natural blonde hair who just want to touch it up with bleaching, but if you have brown and darker hair, bleaching is not such a good idea... unless you´re having a mohawk or other form of short hair (my personal opinion of course!)
  
• I should love my natural self more, instead of forcing the beauty I was born with to be otherwise. So instead of changing the way I look drastically with bleaching, I could change it... a little... (lol lesson learned?)

taking a picture in the morning right in front of the window really makes change. note to self...

I am happy to start a new chapter for my hair, and am excited to see the affects of a few Henna treatments on it in the future.

N. Finsternis