Semi permanent hair dye on long hair

If your hair is not fine, but medium or coarse, I think you'll be fine.  You have to be more careful if your hair is fine (meaning your strands are hard to see, even on an opposite color background).  If it is medium though or thicker, mid back hair is not that long and you can (for most people I think anyway) do quite a lot to it.  Your problem would be if you wanted to go longer.  There's a big difference between how healthy your hair feels at mid back and how it feels closer to waist length.  It seems like that extra year of length is what starts to wear it down if it is medium (at least for me anyway).

I used to dye my hair with harsh permanent stuff when it was mid back length, I lightened it with 40 volume developer and high lift dye to white.  It was dry, but I could keep it at mid back, even though I'd dyed it over 20 times to gradually go blonder and blonder.  Semi-permanent stuff will be way less harsh than that.

So, just be careful if you have fine hair strands, or if you think you might ever want to go longer than mid-back, and otherwise be sure to take good careful care of your hair. 

Depending on what color you want to go, you may even want to think about permanent because then you'd only have to do it once (possibly), then just do the roots after that.  Permanent is more damaging though, but I can't believe once with permanent would be more damaging than 20 times with semi.  You may want to pose that question on the hair color board here and see if any of the pros there answer with an opinion on which would be worse.  

From my experience, if you want to go red, permanent is not that great because red seems to have small molecules and slides off your hair or fades quick, even if its permanent, so for reds, you may want semi.

Hi Juliap,

I read in a similar thread you started on the General forum that your motivation for contemplating color was due to oily hair.  Is the oily hair due to an oily scalp?  Maybe address the oiliness of the scalp instead of coloring (unless, of course, color is what you actually really want).  I found that diluting my shampoo helps reduce the rate at which my scalp gets oily... HTH

Thanks guys for your help.  Its good to see that it is possible to do.  I have been wanting to do this for years and have just been too chicken.  I want to do it cause the oliyness and cause the shine and thickness factor.  I get caught up in believing those commercials and start wanting to dye my hair.  My hair is medium to fine in strand thickness.  I have a mixture of both in my hair.  I went out got some new shampoo and styled my hair with mousse (I have wavy hair)and it looked pretty good.  I think I am just going to leave it alone.  My plan is to let it grow to midback and try to get it totally healthy and natural and if I don't like it after that then I will do something to it.  I just need to stick to my plan it is so hard to be patient when you are growing your hair.