Blonde Asian Models/ Going Blond Rant

From Top: Ai Tominaga, Daul Kim (RIP), So Young (Yeah, that's her name), Soo Joo

On my previous post, I mentioned there's many things to consider before I change my hair colour from black to blond. I didn't want to get in to it because I wasn't exaggerating when I said there's a lot to consider. If you're thinking of doing the same or curious as to why having Swedish blond genetics would make my life so much easier, read on. If not, go look at the pretty blonde asian models above again.

Polar Opposites
The process of going dark to light is not like going light to dark. It is much harder. In fact, black to blonde is as extreme as it gets. You're going from one end of the hair spectrum to the other and a lot of wrong can happen in between. If you  don't bleach it long enough, you end up with orange hair. If you bleach it too much, you end up with distractingly brittle hair. It's a case of Goldilocks: the bleach strength has to be just right and left on for just the right amount of time.

Expensive Reality
For these reasons, going to a professional is almost non-negotiable. It is $$$ and necessary. Unless you want to to do it yourself and face the sky high probability you're going to fuck up. A senior colourists at a salon required me to keep returning charging me her hourly rate that would cost me an upwards of $500+.  Some salons won't even do it if you're hair's too damaged and/or they're not able to do it. Luckily for me, I found one who doesn't charge me an arm and a leg.

Good thing since you have to keep going back every 6 weeks or so to keep up the blond ambition.

The Most Painful Part
For me, my hair was bleached three times to be just shy of platinum blond. Comparatively, someone with brown hair would only have to do it once. Each bleaching takes about 45 minutes before the bleach dries up and need to be reapplied. Depending on your pain tolerance, the burn can be very painful.

What nobody tells you, is that the bleaching is not even the worst part (although it's pretty bad). The toner is. Imagine you just spent 3 hours burning a layer of your skin off. Now imagine somebody pouring alcohol on it and you have to leave it on for a few minutes. That's what toner does to your scalp and IT'S THE WORST. Toner gets rid of the brassiness and harmonizes the colour of your hair. It's oh so painful and oh so important.

Keeping It Up 
Going black to blond is one thing, staying there is another. After you bleach your hair, you're scalp will be soar and scabbing is inevitable. After a week or so it should have recovered.

Here's a little science lesson with blond hair. It has red, yellow, and blue pigments. Blue ones are the first to go because they're small leaving you with red and yellow to form a not so nice orange pigment to your hair. That is brassiness. To combat this, you have to use purple/blue shampoo to put blue pigments back to your hair. If you leave it too long though, you might get too many blue pigments in your hair and turn your hair, well, blue.

As if you're hair hasn't gone through enough already, blue shampoos alleviate one problem but bring forth another: dryness. Because of this, conditioning is a non-negotiable if you don't want hay-like hair.

Can You Commit?
To the time, money, pain, and maintenance it takes to turn black hair to blond?

1 comment:

  1. Yes, because I love being blonde, even tough my hair is rely damage now :( And many People judge beacause of Your blonde hair also :P But it looks oh so cool <3

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