Colouring advice?

[Of the Fae]

Hi :)

Soo.. this is a long story :P I had a henna dye for about five months untill I decided I wanted my natural colour back (ashblonde). I had done this before with bleaching but it had been damaging. The hairdresser advised me to first dye my hair brown and then highlight afterwards.. So I dyed brown. But it was still red, just darker.
Then I went to a special store for hairsalons and asked there. The woman there gave me some sort of colour strip and bleaching powder +developer. I used it and my hair turned tangerine. Bright tangerine...like a radioactive one :P
so I went to the hairdressers to get it fixed and she said I either needed another bleach or I just had to accept a darker colour... So I went with the second option because I did not want my hair to be completely damaged.
So now it is a warm brown. It looks very healthy and no split ends at all, but I really really want my natural colour back. Is it even possible?
Or should I just accept this and wait for it to grow out?
Thanks in advance:)

[Calaelen]

Hairstylist here. Yep, you'll have to accept it, or bleach it out. With what you've told us you've done already, I just say learn to love the colour and then grow it out slowly, as that is the safest option for your locks.

It would be so difficult to match your natural colour anyway, that you'd have a two toned thing going on no matter what as you grow out, so maybe just learnt to love what you have now? This is the biggest downside to colour treatments, when you want to undo it and can't. Sorry for your conundrum.

[Calaelen]

double post..can some super mod make this disappear??

[Of the Fae]

Well thanks anyway :) Now that I am sure there is no other way it is easier to accept, and the colour itself is nice:) Indeed, another bleach is too much for me, then I prefer two tonedness.

[UltraBella]

I am transitioning from a copper red back to my natural hair color which is a dark ash blonde. I first used an all over Demi color to tone down the copper red to a warm brown. Then I took a permanent color that matches my natural color and had it foiled in, like highlights, but it blends with my root grow-out perfectly. I will continue adding more foils in my natural color until I am back to looking like a dark ash blonde and in the mean time I am pampering my hair and treating it very well. It is looking really nice ! I think a skilled stylist will be able to color match your natural color with minimal effort, I have always had great results.

[selderon]

I'd say a skilled colorist would be able to approximate your natural color. Do not expect a perfect match. IIRC, she would have to bleach to lift color and then tone to counteract the red. Damage would be partly dependent on how many levels you intend to lighten.

I encourage you to have a very good colorist assess the condition of your hair and make her best guess about the consequences of trying to highlight your hair so that the natural color blends in better as it grows out, and how many months/sessions she'd recommend to achieve your desired color results with the least damage.

[Of the Fae]

A guess was about three sessions of bleaching :P I think I will wait a month or so before touching it again. it needs moisturising because it gets dry very easily right now. I really hope that eventually I will get back to my natural colour and that my hair will grow fast.

[Shermie Girl]

As a former henna head, I am chiming in.

Bleach, peroxide, colour removers can only remove so much henna. You see, henna bonds with the proteins in your hair and becomes a permanent part of the structure of the hair shaft. You can bleach your hair into oblivion and that stuff will hang on. In fact, the hair will be utterly destroyed before you even get close to removing all of the henna. (Ask me how I know this... ;):o:p)

Soap caps, bleach, highlights and toning, if done carefully and skillfully can remove some of the henna then tone out a lot of the orange/red but until you grow and trim away the previously hennaed hair, you will always have some red/orange in your hair.

Buckle up. You are in for a long, bumpy ride.

[Shany]

I would say, leave your hair like this for now and baby it.
How dark is it?
At the end of april 2010, I had very dark (almost black) red mahogany brown hair. My hairdresser bleached my hair and it came out orange with some darker strands. She used a toner twice and also dyed it twice. I remember she mixed light ash brown dye with some neutral toned dye for the first one. After, she put in some highlights (2 more bleaches).

It looked like this:
http://www.longhaircommunity.com/forums/picture.php?albumid=6067&pictureid=98224

Less than a year later (no dye, no bleach since may 2010, I want my natural hair back) it looks like this:
http://www.longhaircommunity.com/forums/picture.php?albumid=5928&pictureid=95852

So, it fades a lot. There are more pictures in my album with different lightings. My roots looks darker on the second pic, but it actually blends very well with the dyed part. My hair still have a very warm tone, it can look red sometimes, but I never had hennaed hair.

[CrisDee]

A skilled stylist can help you change chemically dyed hair back to your natural color - but as ShermieGirl pointed out, the rules that apply to chemical dye do not apply to henna. It's not even apples/oranges, it's more like apples/tennis balls. The red will always poke through to some extent. Now that you've done the bleach thing, probably the best thing you can do is lots of deep treaments and learn lots of awesome updos until it grows out. :)