Disclaimer: I am no hairdresser, this is just how I have done my hair, and how I have been doing my hair for years. This may not work for yours, as every person's hair is different. I am just telling you what I did to my hair to try to achieve the look I wanted to get.
I am not 100% happy with the way that my hair turned out when I put a dark blonde over it. Although I did put it on each section of my hair gradually to create a more natural looking ombre look I want it to be more natural and ashy than it turned out. Only the light blonde of my hair is very ashy but the top of it isn't. I still love the ombre look but I do want it to look more natural. I was going to put a medium ash all over it but I have decided to do something slightly different.
What I am going to do is put a range of highlights and lowlights through my hair, not loads just a few to make it more multi-tonal to make it look more natural. I plan to put mainly lowlights on the top half going through to the ends of my hair but the highlights from the middle of my hair where the ombre starts to the end.
I will use a bleach for the bottom of my hair but I will not leave it on for very long and I will use less powder from the kit so it won't be as strong. I already have some of the powder at home from a powder kit I brought but I need to get some of the creme to mix it with.
As for the top of my hair I will put a medium blonde through some of it going through to the ends, to create a multi-tonal darker blonde. For this I plan to use an ash blonde to try to make my hair more ashy like my natural colour.
20/12/13
I have just done my hair earlier on today and I am currently letting it air dry, I did blow dry a small section to see if it looks ok, so far so good! I shall take a photo tomorrow once my hair has air dried.
What did I do?
Medium highlights:
I mixed about 1/5 of the Nice and Easy Natural Medium Ash Blonde, ratio 1:1 in my mixing bowl. I always do this, I never mix the whole bottle if I am doing high lights or low lights as it is just a waste if I don't plan on using it all! I didn't even use all of the mixture that I mixed today.
I started from my ear and sectioned the rest of the hair up I then just picked out small parts of my hair gradually taking down more hair from what I sectioned. I put some of the dye using a tinting brush onto each section I selected. I did this for the top half of my hair that was sectioned up as I wanted the medium highlights to be where the darker blonde was already. I didn't do loads of these medium highlights, as I got further to the top layers of my hair I began to put the dye closer to my roots until eventually the top layer had a few touching my roots.
I wanted to make this quite natural, I didn't want to do loads of medium highlights to begin with. I may want more medium highlights on the top half of my hair, but if I do I shall put more in at a later date. I didn't want to put loads of highlights in my hair in case I don't like the way it turns out.
Light highlights:
I mixed bleach powder (the normal bleach kit I used, I have done a post on this before) with a medium 30 lift creme, I normally go for a maximum 40 lift but as my hair isn't dark I decided to go for a medium lift instead, it says it will lighten the hair 7 shades. I mixed a little bit more of the creme to the powder about 1/5 of the creme and a bit of powder until the mixture was a light blue. I wanted more creme than powder as my hair was previously light blonde all over and has only been dyed a dark blonde once or twice it wouldn't need much to lift it.
With this I did the same technique as before, I took small sections of my hair from the bottom going up about 0.5cm maybe even less, I put some of the dye onto my hair then with a glove covered hand I smoothed in the mixture so it wouldn't create any harsh lines, I normally would use a comb but I used my hand for quickness. I continued to do this until I got to the section I started on with the medium dye, for some of the sections of hair from this point onwards to crossed over the 'ombre line' to make some of the darker parts of my hair slightly lighter than before. I never went to the root, the highest I went was probably to about eye level, I still wanted a much darker section on top but I wanted it to look like some natural highlights were coming through.
I left the dye on until the bleach had been on my hair for about 20-30 minutes as I didn't want to lighten it too much this time. I then washed my hair with my normal shampoo and left a hair mask on for a few hours which I then washed off.
Again as my hair is currently air drying to do not know if I want to add any more highlights to my hair to make it more multi-tonal. I shall have a look at it tomorrow when it is dry and decide over the next few days if I want to add any more colour to it.
22/12
Here is a photo of my hair from yesterday while I was at work.
The ombre is slightly lighter, it was a weird blonde before I'm not sure how to describe it but it was quite dull compared to what it is now. It blends a lot more at the section of my hair where it goes from a dark blonde to lighter, which is what I wanted.
However tonight I have added a few more bleach highlights to my hair, same process as before, same bleach and I left this on for about half an hour. Theses highlights were not to the top of my roots, I made them end about eye level like I did before. I shall take a photo tomorrow when it's dry and hopefully I shall be happy with it!
