My Hair Nightmare....Help

Well, it has been three days now and my hair has returned to a (sorta) normal color.

I used to bleach my hair all the time when I was younger, never had a bad experience. I have dark ashy blonde hair that lightens easily.

For the last few years I have had highlights put in. Well, the last few months I decided I needed to save that money, and that I would try home hair color again.

Here is where the nightmare began. I tried the Clairol highlights, Just doing the top and crown of my head. Well, I left it on for 35 minutes, waiting for it to go to that "light lemon yellow" stage, but it stayed at orange. I guess the bleach just wasn't strong enough, because usually my hair lightens right up.

It was really really bad. Just so I didn't look like a clown, I went to the store with a hat on and bought Clairol permanent hair dye one shade darker than my natural shade, Light ash brown. Well, I came out a kind of strawberry blonde orange on top and brown on the ends.

So, the next day I went to a professional. She was able to do a partial highlight on the orange (top) part of my hair with highlights and lowlights. The streaks are blonde and brown, but the roots closest to my head still have an orangeish halo glow effect. She said there was not much else she could do for me.

So, I bought some Clairol Shimmer Lights shampoo, it is the purple toner stuff, and used it just on my roots, because I don't want green or blue ends. It did help, but I still have orange hair.

Anyway, I spent waaaaaay more on all the boo boos than if I had just gone and had it done.

I was going to try washing my hair with whole milk or cream, I have read that can help. Anyone know what else besides dyeing my hair I could do?

Thanks.....

When you're trying to go blonde, if you are the type of hair that winds up orange like this, you should always use a blonde dye with a green base (sometimes called a "drabber"). The green will counteract the red pigment that wants to come out in your hair as you go lighter. The only way you can wind up green doing this is if you keep using the green base blonde dye after your hair has passed orange and gone into yellow (even then you would only have a very slight green tint, like you'd been swimming in a chlorine pool, ...so my point is don't worry about going green in this instance. If you're hair wants to go orange like this it won't happen when you're going blonde).

Going to a professional is always the best route.