New Hair! Adventures in pastels...

I've wanted pastel hair for ages. Lauren over at Bobby Pin Blog did a very helpful series on pastel hair colouring, including the shampoo cap method which I had not tried before. Pastel Hair was very de rigeur in both the 30s and 50s, although as with all high-fashion, high-maintenance looks, it was only worn by the very daring.

1935 Image via The Vintage Baroness

Here are a few of my hair inspirations ;)

I've been using purple toner to get my hair platinum blonde for ages, so I did have some idea about how long to leave things on and what could go wrong. In the past I've found that if I used a purple-hued conditioner on my blonde I ended up with grey or blue streaks where parts of my hair were more absorbent, whereas using a shampoo cap with purple in it worked really well. My favourite thing for this is Touch of Silver shampoo, just leave it on for a couple of minutes to get platinum blonde on bleached hair, or ten minutes if you want a violet rinse effect like ol' Dame Edna up there.

I decided to go for a mint green shade, primarily because nobody does it and because it's the best colour ever!

This was the first attempt...

I'd cut a couple of tiny samples out of my hair after bleaching it, and done a strand test using Directions Apple Green dye mixed with shampoo for one strand and conditioner for another. The test using conditioner looked best, but I was afraid of it looking a little too yellow, like washed out lime, so I ended up using approximately 100ml of conditioner, 1/2tsp. Directions Violet dye (to tone the yellow out) and 1tsp. Directions Apple Green, applied to damp hair after shampooing and combed through for ten minutes. I didn't mind the result but altogether thought it was too pale, and too blue rather than green.

Here's attempt 2. I was less cautious this time, and decided to apply the mixture to hair that had been shampooed then dried to leave it more absorbent. I used about 150ml of conditioner, about 1/3tsp. Directions Violet, and 1.5tsp. Directions Apple Green. This was the colour of the mixture:

And here it is slapped onto my head. I used a tinting brush and applied it in small sections from front to back, then worked it through with a wide tooth comb.

Whoops! Try not to splatter it everywhere when combing through. I got it on the wall, carpet, a plant, and all over the back of the sink.

Here's how it came out! I looked crazed or blurry in every single one of these photos. This shade matches my eyebrow pencil a lot better, which in these pictures is Barry M no.20, available online but I *think* it may have been discontinued as it is no longer stocked in the shops. They do a proper mint green but it's very white-based. I'll probaby use it in the corners of my eyes to pick up the hair colour, but as an eyebrow pencil it was too pale and made me look really pink.

Then, feeling suitably green, I went round to my lovely wife Sera's, and cooked her some delicious vegan burritos! We also got some fancy desserts from M&S, I had a peach Melba jelly (It's vegan!) Yay!

Current loves

This started off as a post about growing up and accepting the responsibilities of adulthood. I wasn't happy with my inability to articulate myself wittily enough whilst discussing such a tender subject, so have saved that diatribe for another day and decided to just show you all the stuff I am currently obsessed with, most of which are things that make me reflect on the aforementioned situation.

Pastel bubble hair. Having a quarter/third of life crisis as I approach my twenty-sixth birthday has given me a craving to dye my hair again, having been blonde for a few years now. Growing up, I always loved these ladies' hair, even though they are all wigs (and one of them isn't really a lady). In fact now I think about it these three are probably my ultimate style icons.


Tom Waits. Music for grown ups, definitely... a guy I was at uni with used to play his albums in our studio and I just didn't get it, at the time I was listening solely to hardcore European crust punk, willfully closing my ears to everything else - if it didn't have a strong ethical message, I didn't want to know. Here's a song which as well as being great and having a cool video, is apt for the subject at hand and was covered by the Ramones - a band that kind of get maligned by members of the modern punk scene as being too frivolous, which is utter bollocks.



Beat writers - William S. Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac. I always loved Hunter S. Thompson and Chuck Palahniuk, and these are the guys they learned their style from, they grew up during the great depression and WWII and made their mark during the cold war years - as such their writing is gritty, uncompromising and chaotic. I'm currently reading 'Post Office' by Bukowski and 'Junky', Burroughs' semi-autobiographical story of heroin addiction and life on the edge of society.

Here's William S. Burroughs doing vocals on a track from Tom Waits' 'Black Rider' conceptual play/LP which they collaborated on, his voice is haunting. He was 79.



Geisha fashion - not really anything to to with the others, I just really like this at the moment. Here's a hat I made recently using Japanese Kanzashi flowers, intricately folded from tiny squares of fabric. I'm currently working on some more styles, for a Harajuku-inspired photoshoot I'm helping to style on Wednesday for Chimp Magazine. Hat by Kalandra Jane Designs, photo by Berni Harris Photography.


Daria! I never got to watch this when it was originally on - I was probably a little young anyway, but my stepdad and I used to watch Beavis and Butthead which was on around the same time (and from which Daria was actually a spinoff), back when MTV was still clinging onto its last shreds of counterculture credibility. It's full of all the sardonic wit a young lady needs, and should be required viewing for every girl who can't (or couldn't) wait for high school to end. You can watch every episode of Daria for free here, apart from the two feature-length episodes.



Perhaps inspired by the grunge soundtrack of Daria - Riot Grrl. I always resisted angry girl music as a teenager, totally rejecting any music made by women and seeing it as aggressive feminism, passé in a world where I surpassed my male classmates academically and always felt equal to my male friends. However, I obsessed constantly about boys I fancied - maybe if I'd listened to a bit of Joan Jett or L7 I would have felt a bit more secure about myself, rather than wallowing in introspection and worrying about how I was seen by my peers.



Micheal Cera films. Superbad, Youth in Revolt, Juno, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist - at first I hated this new brand of awkward alterna-teen angst comedy. I have now come to appreciate them despite the fact I still think they're a bit twee and formulaic, I like the departure from the plasticky teen movies of the late 90s-early 2000s. I'm sure there weren't sweet, goofy boys when I was growing up... they were all little bastards. Maybe I just scared off the nice ones with my forcefield of adolescent rage? Anyway... I like them.