By Allison Hall

After about 5 years of dying my hair black, I took the plunge and had my hair bleached out. It’s only been a week, but it’s been a huge adjustment. Every time that I glance in the mirror, my immediate reaction is to rear back in shock…I really can’t believe that the person that’s staring back at me IS me!

In my life, I’ve had my hair pretty much every color imaginable. Whether I was 12 and coloring it with Jell-O and Kool-Aid, or 17 and lightening it with Frost & Glow, I’ve always been a huge fan of changing it up. I have naturally medium brown hair and for whatever reason, I’ve always preferred my hair black, blue black to be exact. But like I said, I like to change it up and seeing as how I have super short hair right now, I figured that this was as good a time as any to try to emulate one of my favourite styles of all time…Mia Farrow’s Vidal Sasoon hair in Rosemary’s Baby.

Since my only experience with bleaching my hair, was always done by myself with a home kit, I figured that it was probably in my best interest to go to a salon to have it done. My super sweet colorist warned me that the bleach might burn my scalp, but I’m pretty tolerant so I just brushed it off. The salon that I went to uses natural based products, but I mean bleach is bleach; it’s stripping the pigment out of your hair, so it can’t be that natural. Well let me tell you, about 5 minutes after she started applying the bleach to my hair my scalp was on fire! The good old Revlon that I used to use never burned like this; in fact I didn’t remember it burning at all.

After she had slathered my hair, she told me that it would take about 15 minutes to process and from looking in the mirror I could see that it was working fast, so I sucked it up, opened a magazine and tried to ignore the pain. We rinsed it out, dried it off a bit and went back to my chair. So my hair was a lovely mixture of blond and orange…blonde at the roots and orange at the tips where there were still some remnants of that blue black color that I love so much.

Application number two. If I thought that it burned the first time, I had no idea how much more uncomfortable it was going to be the second round. Another 15 minutes later and I was back at the sink, having my hair rinsed out with ice cold water (which has to be done to neutralize the bleach). After a few minutes with a toner on and a final wash out, it was the moment of truth…I have blonde and yellow hair! It’s not exactly the ashy blonde Agyness Deyn color that I was going for, but it’s definitely not black. And realistically becoming a blonde is a process right?

The next day while still getting used to my new reflection and no longer raking my fingers across my searing scalp, I couldn’t help but wonder how Madonna could have done this to herself every three days while on her Blonde Ambition tour…I mean that’s just insane! I’m already dreading having to go back in a few weeks to have my roots redone. Oh and just for the record, after only a week, I already have some pretty major re-growth. But hey, we suffer for fashion, so what’s a little pain every four weeks or so.