Secrets of a bottle blond
Don’t sacrifice healthy hair in the search for a chic platinum look
For the past eight years, I’ve willingly submitted my scalp to chemical burns every eight weeks in the name of blissful blondness.
Each time, I swear I’ll never, ever go through it again, but then I catch one glimpse of my root-less platinum strands and forget all about the sting. I am a bleach addict.
It started with highlights (the gateway drug). I had always hated my hair colour, a mousey brown, leading me to harass my mom with requests to dye it. She refused time and time again, preaching about how I’d never get my natural colour back (precisely my goal!). But then eighth-grade graduation rolled around, and I finally got my loving mother to crack. She allowed me to go under the heater after I dramatically claimed that my bedazzled millennial pink tulle dress would not under any circumstance go with my brown hair. She caved.
I continued to get a full head of highlights all through high school, and my hair started breaking off from the repeated lightening and frying. I was on the fast-track to Gollum and it wasn’t pretty. I went into damagecontrol mode and began religiously conditioning my hair.
One word, however, caused me to relapse hard: prom. I needed Marilyn Monroe hair to go with my cherry-red ball gown, right? I was naïve, though, when I first bleached my hair. I had no idea how much it would hurt. I had eczema as a kid and continue to have super sensitive skin. The pain was unbearable, but then something even worse set in: the itch. It was as though someone had rubbed my head with poison ivy. And you can’t scratch your scalp while the hydrogen peroxide is on there because you run the risk of getting an infection or scabs (not cute). I remember digging my nails into my arm to distract my brain from the fire on my head.
I sat there while it processed, fully convincing myself I was meant to be a brunette after all … until I saw the finished result: it was all worth it. This time, however, I didn’t play around with aftercare, because if you’re leaving the salon with bleach- ed hair, you’re leaving with damaged hair. You have to be good to it. I’ve been platinum for almost a decade now and my hair has never been healthier. I’ve tried every product out there, and I’ve devised a rock-solid, strand-coddling regimen. Here are three of my tried-and-true bleachedblond essentials.