Essay Procrastination - Colour B4 Review

I have naturally dark hair, probably one shade off black. I've dyed it every colour under the yellow sun. Apart from blonde. I would never do blonde. However much Agyness Deyn/ Taylor Momsen make me think it might be a good idea.

Around six months ago, despite my mother's warnings, I dyed my hair jet black without realising that you can't simply dye over it, but you have to wait for it to grow out. This was a problem as my hair is no longer the short pixie cut it was when I dyed it on a weekly basis.

The black hair suited me fine with my stupidly pale complexion and permanently red lips, but after a while I got very bored with the sleek and harsh styling that matches the colour and craved some natural brown curls. After one awful mistake where I managed to dye only my roots red and leave the rest of it as dark as ever I consulted various salons, only to find out that the colour stripping process was not recommended because of the damage to the hair, and the very student unfriendly price.

So imagine my surprise when my sister strolled along and told me that for only £12.99 I could literally go back to my roots. She showed me the Colour B4 product and I was, like many people I have spoken to about this, very skeptical. But I really had no other choice. The first obstacle was actually finding it. I went to some of the smallest and largest branches of Boots in central London but couldn't find it anywhere. So I went online and ordered it there, and Boots' courier delivery meant that it arrived the next day.

So, straight away, when I really should have been revising I wrapped myself up in a binbag and headed to the bathroom to undye my hair, with the help of my oh-so-heterosexual boyfriend. The first thing that struck me was the smell. The worst smell you can possibly imagine to come out of a bottle, and not something you would ever smother your scalp in unless you were truly desperate. Which I was. The worst thing was that the instructions specifically state that there should be no breeze, so we couldn't even open the window to stop the awful suffocation.

In total the process took about 45 minutes, with several repetitions of the covering, waiting, washing, and by the end of it I felt like an asphyxiated prune. But the relief when I looked in the mirror and saw that my hair was still on my head, and the joy when I plucked out a hair and held it to the light to see the unfamiliar brown shining back at me made the entire experience worthwhile. Before and after pictures as promised:

BEFORE

ATFER

I dried my hair and left it tousled and hanging casually around my shoulders, happy to finally look relaxed, and hugely shocked at how well the product had worked! The final result is a bit patchy due to my period of gingerness before I went to the dark side. I think I'll leave it like this for now, but the instructions state that it can be dyed immediately.

So for those of you stuck in an unhappy and dark h-area (couldn't resist, sorry), finally there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Jessica Wilde