L'Oreal Prelightening Creme - test run

Have felt like a mad scientist all afternoon doing this, been great fun! First of all I cut two swatches of hair.


Then I made up a little of the L'Oreal Prelightening creme. Not as scary as I had thought, there is a bottle of liquid and you add the 2 sachets of powder and the tube of cream, shake and apply. I mixed a little of all three onto a plastic takeaway lid and mixed it with a drinking straw - such a professional!


I also decided to see what would happen if I just applied the Casting Creme Satin Blond semi-permanent to my hair as it is, so I mixed up a dollop using my tried and tested method.


I put a hair swatch in each and made careful note of the time.

Will put Toni & Guy out of business at this rate!

In the meantime I made Emily take some "before" photos for me. Much prefer the back view to the one from the front.


(thank god I decided to switch to smaller photos!) This one does nicely show off the unintentional graduation of hair colour and the nice grey line down my parting though!

After 20 mins I washed the sample that had been dunked in the colour and there was no discernible difference, as I had expected.

I checked the lightened sample at 20, 30, 40, 50 and 60 mins. 60 mins is the maximum time and the results are pretty impressive. If you think orange hair is impressive.


Can you imagine if I was really stupid and had just decided to leave it at that?! Would look like I was supporting the Dutch all the way tomorrow night!


Side note - how come if I was trying to take a photo of my nail it would have been horribly out of focus? What is that all about?


Side by side with original hair colour swatch


Side by side again, this time up against Emilys' left boob - apparently showing them against a black background was vital, for some reason!

So, its orange. Fairly inevitable but doesn't mean it wont scare the bejaysus out of me when I do it for real in a mo!

Luckily I had anticipated that and had selected a Casting Cream colour that deals specifically with the problem of lightened hair looking "too warm" (they mean "orange").

So the poor little hair swatch now gets dunked in a freshly made up dollop of Blond Satin.

And ta-dah!

Blond! Its a really nice darkish beige/blond which looks a bit golden but not really orange.


This time my lovely assistant is Steve - look at the state of those hands!


Now bear in mind the lighter of these two has had an hour dunked in bleach and 20 mins in a colour that also contains hydrogen peroxide and has been rinsed and dried, no conditioner, it is in pretty amazing shape. I am seriously impressed with how soft and shiny it feels and I love the colour.

My only concern is that when I do it on my head it is likely to be very matt, one colour all over and so obviously home dyed, but there's no turning back now. Time to do the deed. Watch this space for the "after" photos...............

(oh god, I am feeling confident. That's GOT to be a bad thing, hasn't it? Wish me luck!)

Post Edit 2 hrs later....
I swear that was the most terrifying thing I have ever done in my life. What I hadn't allowed for was that not all my hair had the permanent colour on, so having gaily slapped on the bleach on tips and ends, leaving for a bit and then working through into roots it quickly became apparent that the re-growth section and the hair that had only had semi-perm colour on it was going to go waaaaaaaaaaay lighter, very, very, very quickly. In the end rinsed the bleach off after 45 mins and then was nearly sick when I looked in the mirror, the roots were totally bleached, no pigment at all, the 3 inches of semi perm had gone very light blond and the rest was orange, really really orange, more orange than the swatch had been and I couldnt leave the bleach on any longer otherwise the top 3 inches were going to be white and the rest orange and the semi-perm Casting Creme wouldnt be able to match it up. Vile moment, hands shaking so much putting on the casting creme and to be honest it was only when it was dry and finish that my heart stopped pounding. It is by no means perfect and I suspect the roots are going to look awful when they start showing, which is likely to be tomorrow! But for now I think I got off lightly - at one point I seriously thought I was going to have to have 6 inches cut off my hair.

Now I need a really, really bloody massive drink, if you will excuse me!
From this:


to this:


Extra Post Edit: Can you hair colour intensify over night? I woke up on Sunday looking like a ginger tom cat - really quite scary marmalade coloured hair. Of course guest house was rammed so had to do breakfast like it but then made rushed trip to Boots, decided on Perfect 10 Medium Ash blond, thank goodness it seems to have worked and has reduced the orange to manageable levels - its chucking it down or I'd do a further photo update. Just shows the quality of stuff these days though, my hair isn't in any worse condition than when I started all this, which is frankly nothing short of a miracle!