Highlights over henna?

[sweetpeggyo]

Sorry if there is already a thread about this...

I started using henna this summer and am not ready for highlights now...but was wondering what my options are in the future in case my color gets uncomfortably dark.
If I found a stylist to agree to subtly highlight hennaed hair (I used organic henna from Henna Color Lab, no metallic salts), would my highlights be a crazy orange or pink? Would it be more damaging than usual?
TIA to anyone with experience or knowledge on this topic :)

[Anje]

I expect you'd get orange highlights, if you don't go crazy with the bleach. How damaging depends largely on how much lift you're going for -- it's going to take more processing to achieve the same shade as it would with your unhennaed hair, but maybe you wouldn't lighten to the same point, because your color isn't the same.

[lapushka]

Yes, you'd most certainly get orange streaks. Henna is notoriously hard to get to a white blonde again. I once had to double-process with the highest % in bleach (not to mention that after coloring over that the second time I had a chemical cut/burn). Yeah, not even black (regular) dye is that hard to get out.

And BTW my hair was still orange after the double processing, so we decided to dye over it with a light brown dye instead of a blonde... to be able to "cover" the orange.

[Nimia]

I've had highlights put into my hennaed hair, and it's worked wonderfully. I went to a well-regarded colorist to do it, though; she did a test run first, and then did balayage (painted on streaks, no foil). Because the test had shown that the color lifted very quickly to the orangey tone I wanted -- I'm talking 5-10 minutes -- she had an assistant help her put the streaks on in order to speed up the process, and then very carefully watched the color change. She washed out the first half of my hair, waited a minute or two, then washed out the other half when it reached the same level of lightening.

A few streaks did get a little too light, veering toward apricot. I just slopped some henna onto them the next time I did my roots, to tone them down.

My natural color is a medium ash blonde. I had the streaks put in to soften the difference between my hennaed natural color and my hennaed previously-dyed-and-lightened hair, and the result is natural enough that people are convinced I must have been born a redhead. I'll probably keep having the streaks put in, as I like the lighter color around my face.

I'm assuming that the bleached streaks are damaged, but I'm okay with that trade-off.

[sweetpeggyo]

Thanks Nimia! I was thinking if they were too orange or light then I'd just henna over them and still get a dimensional effect. I'll suggest this to my stylist at some point :)