Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Another Frenchwomen post

Friggin' Frenchwomen (and Frenchgirls, who appear to have no youth-specific style culture), with their emphasis on chic and subtle, do not create sufficient demand for odd hair-dye colors. (Or nail colors, for that matter, but on that front I came prepared.) If there's a store that specializes in this kind of thing, I haven't found it, online or off-. All I did find were several boxes of at-home bleach, but a bleach intended to make women look like natural blondes, not as a first step prior to going pink or blue. None of these looked like the right thing, and the one that claimed to work on dark hair promised to turn it strawberry-blond. Not it, not it at all! That, and "Nordic," really?

7 comments:

Britta said...

With your ombré hair, were you planning on dyeing the tips pink or blue, or just lightening them? Or are you going to do something else with your hair that involves pink/blue? Perhaps you should take a trip to Amsterdam, or some place where people seem like they might dye their hair non-natural colors?

rshams said...

Berlin might also be a good place to find pink/blue/out-of-the-ordinary colors. Good luck!

Phoebe Maltz Bovy said...

Britta, rshams,

Seriously, any W Eur country would have to be better on this front. I saw a photo online of pink hair in Paris... turns out it's of a British fashion blogger. Saw a little girl with a pink streak today... with a German-speaking tourist family.

Anyway, the bleach is in, on the tips, and I'm attempting ombre after a first application a bit higher than the tips that got that bit reddish-brown. My plan, if I don't make it to a more hair-experimentation-friendly part of Europe beforehand, is to look into the Manic Panic selection of Ricky's back in NY.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy said...

Or in more visual terms I'm shooting for this, with the future possibility of this.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy said...

Verdict: after keeping some L'Oreal uselessness that smelled, at least, like bleach in my hair for 1,000x the suggested amount of time, I have achieved... a subtle, dare-I-say-natural-looking ombré effect, ending in a slightly reddish dirty-blond. Granted my hair's not fully dry yet, but I've done this kind of thing before and have a sense of what it'll be. Not the dramatic fade-to-platinum I'd hoped for, and that would be conducive to neon colors later on, but a win for those among my readers (you know who you are!) who'd had their doubts about this project in the first place.

rshams said...

Phoebe,

Utterly unrelated to this post, but I felt that this was you-bait in several ways:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/14/elle-fanning-bar-mitzvahs_n_876301.html

Phoebe Maltz Bovy said...

Gosh, it ought to be, but I don't have a clever response, unless it's clever to point out that I could imagine a school principle getting carted out in handcuffs for having that page open in his office.