bleaching black hair??

Hi, I'm viet with really dark brown hair. I've tried dying my hair a different colour two times already but each time, the colour didn't turn out light enough and wasn't really noticeable. You could only see it if the sun was shining on my head. Right now, my hair is a sort of black cherry colour which u can only see if the sun was shining on it. I wanna make it black cherry but make it noticeable enough that I don't need the sun to be shining on it for people to see it. But to do this, I think I need to bleach my hair which I'm not sure if I want to do cuz i heard it extremely damages your hair. Is this true? Also, do any of you guyz know of any other ways in which I can get the colour that I want without bleaching?? And if I was to bleach my hair, would I be able to do at home? Thanks.

Vivian

Yea you pretty much have to bleach your hair if you want any noticeable results. Having jet black hair and also being Viet, I know how hard it is to lighten Asian hair. If you have money to spend, go to a salon and there will be less of a chance of something going wrong. Costs around $40-80 to get it professionally done. You can try the home bleaching kits, they go for about $10. The thing with home bleaching kits is they're not as powerful as salon supplies and also when you bleach your own hair there's a more chance of you messing up. From my experience Calirol's MaxiBlonde seems to be the strongest of the store brands. The thing is you have to leave it in for a LOOONG time. Even though the box says 30 mins or an hour or whatever, Asian hair has like 349853 times the amount of blackness in their hair then any other race. I left the MaxiBlonde in my hair for 6 hours and could only get it to mid/dark-blonde. I hear that if you wait a few days (and condition in between), and then bleach it again, it'll become light yellow (like the color inside of a banana). You could try buying salon strenth stuff (I hear Clairol's BW-2 or 7th Stage Bleach bleaches are the strongest, added with PureWhite 40 volume developer). From then you can dye your hair any color. I suggest buying a black vegetable-based dye (has no chemicals, doesn't harm your hair)... Punky Colour and Manic Panic make good ones. So in case you make a mistake you can just dye your whole head black (black covers EVERY color). Bleaching DOES damage your hair but not that bad... frankly I think that if you condition your hair and take care of it really good after you bleach it, your hair will be in even better shape then before you had bleached it. Some good bleaching site links are below, good luck.

http://www.telepath.com/rcs/goblonde/Howto.htm
http://hair.mercatur.net/
http://www.stanford.edu/~tiggerr/semiperm.html