When you dye your hair do you...

[WaimeaWahine]

This is for henna or chem!

Was reading in some magazine that said you should only do the roots and comb out the dye to the ends. What about product build up? I don't know anything about henna but chem dying expands the hair follicle so if you only did the roots you could end up with bad ends. Thoughts?

I do my roots and some of my ends but would never rake a comb through my hair during the dye process!

[Gypsy]

I look for areas of gray- could be roots only or could be a few areas that the gray moved down the shaft- and do those, and searching for those areas can take almost the whole dye time, so when I have all the hot spots covered, I finish off the rest of my hair in case there has been some color fade.
I would never comb it through, though. My hair is in a weird, tangly damp state when I dye so combing would be impossible; I would never be able to get a comb through the curls and tangles as the dye itself isn't slippery to help it along.

[EvaSimone]

I used to do whole head dying and it pretty much wrecked my hair.

Now I have around 11" of virgin hair and the other 18" is funky and porous. I put hendigo on from my chin down to get my un-virgin hair to blend with the virgin stuff. So I selected other on the poll.

[Isilme]

only the roots, only the roots. If I did my whole head all the time I would end up with burgundy hair. I use henna. But If I did chem dye I would do only the roots to. My few encounters with bottle dye wrecked my hair.

[ooo]

Whenever I dyed my hair, I never ever used the same colour twice. So I always had to use the colour all over.

Ok. That was not really true. Because I used the same kind of brown twice. The second time I used it, because my lengths were turning green. Anyway I had to use the colour all over again.

[Nadi]

I dye my hair black (chemically) and I do the whole head. By the time my roots bother me enough to make me want to dye again, the black has usually faded to very dark brown on my ends. So I always do the whole head, to be sure to end with black everywhere.

[ravenreed]

When I chemicalyl dye my hair, I do the roots first, then at the end I put dye on the rest of my hair. If you use dye that lightens, what happen is the hair get progressively lighter towards the ends if you put dye on all at once. If I don't do the ends at all, the color fades, especially now that I am using demi-permanent. However I have been using reds (burgundy mostly) for 20 some years and the red family is notorious for fading.

Since I am going to try henna, which shouldn't fade, I will probably do a full application until I hit burgundy, then do root only, with maybe a full application as needed to keep color even. Hoping it works.

[amaiaisabella]

I will be doing the whole head each time because I am trying to diffuse the red from henna

[enfys]

Whole head, non permanent dye. If it was permanent I'd do the roots, but no chance would I comb it.

[Eden Iris]

Whole head. I do henna now, and it's easier to slop it on the whole head rather than try to do only roots, and my hair is so dark that the ends can't get any more burgundy.

When I used chemical dye, I also did whole head because the color on the length was faded and looked better with a fresh coat.