I know I said I was going to let my roots grow out and just dye the ends but my gray hairs were bugging me. I thought I only had gray hairs mainly in the front but as my hair kept growing, I noticed they were all over. I think it just made me appear older. One day I woke up and just decided to color my hair. I love the faded orange but it was time for another change.

I did my research on what type of red I wanted to do. I wanted my red to be more on the orange side, copper. Semi permanent products weren’t going to work for my roots since semi colors only deposit color. No lifting at all. Semi colors also don’t do well in covering gray hairs. I went with a permanent hair color with developer. I think that this process is less damaging since the hair does lift about 3 levels without the use of bleach. I was close to bleaching my roots since I fell I love with a light copper but I stopped myself.

I was looking for the L’Oreal HiColor Red HiLights Permanent Creme Hair Color in Copper when I went to Sally’s. They didn’t have any but they did have Sizzling Copper. I decided to grab 3 boxes of those and 1 red box.

I wanted red orange hair, something in between. This was the first product ever I used when I dyed my virgin hair and it did lift pretty well. I decided to give it another shot.

The mixture is very much orange when I added the Copper Intensifier which came inside every Sizzling Copper box.

My plan was to mix 2 boxes of Sizzling Copper with a little bit of red with 30 volume developer and apply this only to my dark roots. I let it process for about 20 minutes and then I would use the last box with a little bit of red but mix it with 10 volume developer instead of 30 and applying it on my ends. I must have been on autopilot because I ended up using 30 volume. When I realized my mistake, there was no way to fix it. I still applied the mixture to my ends but instead of leaving it on for 30 minutes, I only did 15. My ends only needed color deposited since they were very light already. I was fearing that my ends were going to snap off since my ends were already fragile and damaged.

I was hoping for the best. I really wanted to leave it longer but I was scared for my ends. I washed it off and….

I didn’t like it. The color reminded me of Chucky the Killer doll. I was trying to figure out how I can possibly fix this. I didn’t want to cause further damage to my hair because my ends felt so horrible.

I did a treatment but I know eventually I’m going to have to cut all of those dead ends. I almost gave up and thought about putting semi permanent black hair dye and call it a day. I bought ArcticFox in Transylvania, which is the black color. I let 3 days passed and decided to style it to see if I changed my mind. I did.

I don’t know why it took 3 days but in the end, I did like it. I didn’t like the dark red roots at first but now I do. My ends are lighter and that’s okay. I did trim a little of my ends because they felt so damaged. It’s definitely a look. Kinda choppy but I like it.

Not sure if I’ll maintain the color. If I do, I would like to try Copper just by itself or Sizzling Copper again but without the red. Weird but as the days go by, I like it even more. I was kinda discouraged to do red because I wasn’t sure if it would look good on me and I was a little overwhelm on the different type of reds there are. I was thinking of skipping it and just do it dark brown. I’m glad I gave it another chance.