My adventures with semi-perm alternative coloring

Hi everyone!

So in mid-January I decided to do alternating stripes of black and yellow in my (naturally dark, level 3-ish) hair for reasons that involve NFL football. I figured that I could just change it up later and play with all other sorts of unnatural colors too.

My process was as follows:

Separate out a "top layer" of hair, basically a two inch block down my head the whole way around so that all around my crown was gathered up.

2 applications of bleach, 40 developer the first go and 20 the second, got my hair down to a shade probably a step above inside-banana-peel yellow

Alternating chunks of Manic Panic Raven and Manic Panic Electric Banana.

Results from this were pretty good, though the black tended to fade pretty quickly (and I reapplied it after 2 weeks), the yellow remained positively radiant up until a week after the Super Bowl when I decided to change up the colors.

Next fun time (about 3 weeks after the original):

This time I wanted to try Special Effects, 2 shades. I bought Wild Flower and Joyride, both purple shades (Joyride being a pinker purple and Wild Flower a bluer purple).

I did a soap cap (mixture of bleach powder, 20 developer, clarifying shampoo, conditioner), and it brought my hair pretty much back to the yellow color it was before the dye.

I then applied the Joyride & Wild Flower and basically got a burgundy-gold color where the Joyride was and a really uneven purple-blue-green gradient where the Wild Flower was (though I wasn't a huge fan of the consistency - it was very hard to get out of the bottle so I ended up using less of the bottles than I thought).

So then I did another soap cap a week and a half later, and applied Manic Panic Purple Haze instead. I think I again had the problem where I didn't use enough of it, and though the pieces in the very front were a vivid purple, all around it was more of a burgundy-pink.

Cut to yesterday, another 2 weeks after the first Purple Haze application, and I did a third soap cap (I actually have a picture of the results from this one - it was sort of a seafoam green/blue)


I went to apply Purple Haze. This time I actually ran out before being able to properly saturate the hair, and though the color is gorgeous at the roots and ends of the bleached parts, in between is basically brown.

Basically I'm getting super frustrated with purple and thinking about trashing the whole experiment with it and going with a turqoise instead to actually contrast my hair under it instead of blending.

My question is, what's the opinion on waiting another week and doing more bleach-work, will it completely kill my hair? I just don't know where the limit is with this. As you can see in that last picture, there are some flyaways and a little bit of breakage (there was no conditioner used in that case, only shampoo after the soap cap), but overall after a regular conditioner my hair does not feel any worse from the bleaching (this is probably also due to the fact that the MP dyes contain conditioning agents). With the soap caps, I've tried to keep them at a slightly higher percentage of shampoo & conditioner than bleach mixture to minimize the damage. I'm considering just doing straight out bleach maybe with a 10 developer next time? Opinions please? I think I'm addicted to alternative hair coloring.

You'd be amazed at how much cheap shampoo and hot water can suck out dyes. Try it (alot!), it takes so much work out of the soap cap. and SFX is generally a better brand of dye..so even with a soap cap, be prepared for it to stick around for longer than you'd like.