Aaah! The strands of wisdom… Some people have them coming faster than others. In February 2020 it’s been 2 years since I stopped dyeing my hair. And yes, I’m starting to be quite wise if you look at the highlights that come out of it 😉
I admit it was a difficult decision to make. I thought about it for a few weeks. Then I talked to my boyfriend, who encouraged me to let it go natural. It helped me take the plunge and go for it. And then I told myself that if I didn’t like it, well, I could always go back to hiding my grey hair as I had been doing for about fifteen years.
15 years…
Fifteen years; hiding it, not accepting it, to not like it when it’s windy because the wind separates the hair and you show your regrowth to everyone, going to the hairdresser for highlights and lastly having to redo my regrowth every three weeks so it doesn’t show…
It got time consuming and it wasn’t until I decided to let the natural out that I realized it. You have no idea how liberating that is. How good I feel. Just me… au naturel.
To make the leap, I went the hard way, with no real transition. I’d had blonde highlights a couple of months before, so it softened the demarcation a little bit. My niece, who was taking a hairdressing course at the time, said to me: “Matante, we can’t leave you like this…”. And yes, I stayed ‘like that’. 🙂
It must be said that my hair doesn’t bleach easily and that to make a transition with grey highlights, we should have bleached it as much as possible… It’s not something I wanted to do because it would have been too hard on my hair and the highlights might not even have come out grey.
The Roots
In the whole process, the step I found the most difficult was growing it back to about 10 centimeter’s. Because once you get past ten centimeter’s you can see that you’re letting them come back naturally. Before that, it just seems like you haven’t had time to do your hair dye…
But luckily, there’s some tricks. Gray hair shows less on curly hair, when you comb it up, and there’s the little color spray that hides the regrowth. Now that’s fun!
It’s like the color sprays for Halloween costumes, but in brown, blond or black depending on your hair color. It’s definitely not perfect! When you touch it, it stains; it can stain clothes; when it rains, it runs. But it helps for the days when I didn’t like my regrowth as much, or when I had less courage to face my strands of wisdom.
Even if I had made the decision to let them come back naturally, there was still a period of adaptation and acceptance that was necessary before I was perfectly in tune with my new look.
It’s so important to feel good and be ready to make the change. Because it’s also a lot in the attitude, when we feel less beautiful and good in our skin it shows in what we give off, so if a little spray can help to get through the days when we feel less confident and powerful, well why not!
I was the first surprise to like it. On the other hand, it must be said that there’s a trend right now for a return to the natural hair. Even young women who don’t have gray hair are getting gray highlights… I must admit that I don’t quite understand this one… hahahahaha!!
Dane xox
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