kethrai's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- How to Dye Your Hair With Henna How to: Dye your hair with henna. I'm kind of a hippy-dippy chick when it comes to glop I put on my skin and hair (athough my Yankee skinflint...er...frugal mentality keeps me in V05 and Suave) but when I first got interested in dyeing my hair, the thought of chemical smell made me want to die. So. Henna. Since over time I've answered tons of questions on various boards about how to, here is the handy How-To Kethrai Guide to Henna Dye. Where to obtain it: When I started dyeing my hair, I got the dye from my local health food store. Since it was (ahem) cheaper, I went with Rainbow Henna brand, which comes in friendly colored containers with various shades, from neutral to blonde to red. I went with red. Since I'm now an official henna freak, I buy it in bulk by the pound from various internet sources, including www.cedarvale.net and also www.atlanticspice.com... not as many choices of color, but hey, I go with red. Fire engine red. What you need: *Henna What to do, or Stage One, Mixing: First, obtain your henna. Set aside beside the bathroom sink: glass bowl, chopstick or wooden stirring implement and your gloves and plastic bag. Do not use a metal bowl or metal stirring implement unless your are interested in greenish hair. Put the henna in the bowl with hot or boiling water. It will be a greenish powder, and mix up to a consistency somewhere between cowpat and oatmeal. Run with the soupy cream-of-wheat texture, it's easier to glop on your head. Add your choice of additives. Henna in its natural state smells rather like cowpat mixed with grass, leading to the danger of your significant other pretending to graze your head and making mooing noises. This can be disturbing if a) you are sensitive about your weight or b) aware of your SO's overwhelming fondness for steak, and makes you nervous. I throw in essential oils for scent and plain white vinegar as a fixative; you may also add olive oil for conditioning or eggs for same. This is where early, unsupervised Kitchen Chemistry comes in handy.
Pick a time when you will be either alone in the house or the persons around have a sense of humor and you don't mind them seeing you naked. This is easy to achieve if you are an owl or a lark and the other members of your household run on an opposite schedule; otherwise, wait for them to be gone. Strip naked. Put all clothing and other potentially staining objects, including the cat, out of the way. Henna never, ever washes out of clothing. Never. You do not even want this stuff on your painting t-shirts. Trust me. Don gloves. Goop on head. Scrub well into roots. Attempt to not glop on floor, sink, all of body, or cat, who is of course not going to stay OUT of anywhere, being, after all, a cat. Henna can stain skin, so if you glop it somewhere that you're not interested in having orangey skin patches, do wipe it off. Take chic grocery bag and bag your head. Stage Three, or Waiting: Wander out into other living area--still naked-- where you have thoughtfully set up your hair dryer in advance. Load in soundtrack of choice; I suggest the Drag Queen/Teacher's Retirement Party Dance Remix, including "Mony, Mony", "YMCA", and "I Will Survive" to start. You may then either park yourself with a book and sit under the hairdryer for an hour or more, or indulge in the New Guinea Mudwoman Dance. While away your hour or so listening, reading, dancing, poaching your head under the dryer, and chasing the cat across the room, who is freaked out because Mom Has Bagged Her Head and Is Making Scary Crinkling Noises. Alternatively, you may also unplug the hose from the hair dryer hood periodically and shoot warm air at the cat. At the end of your hour or hour plus, go back into the bathroom, toss the plastic bag from off your head into the trash, and climb into the shower to shower off the guck from your head. Rinse in hot and cold, and don't be afraid to use shampoo and condition thoroughly. You will still smell somewhat like grass. Aftercare: Nothing. Nada. Go on with your normal wash and condition cycle. Precautions: Henna acts like a lacquer on each and every strand in your hair. This can be GREAT--no split ends, ever--or BAD--you can't dye over henna with conventional dye, because it doesn't stick. (You can go the other way around, dye and then henna, but I would let a couple of weeks lapse between, just because.) This can also make your hair seem thicker--which can be GREAT, if you have fine limp hair like mine, or BAD, if you're Curly McThickTop (bitch) to start with. Henna is to hair dye what watercolor is to oil-based paint. IE, it's a color wash--you can't dye darker hair lighter with henna, for the most part. You can lighten darker hair naturally--say, comb lemon juice through it, sit in the sun for an afternoon, and THEN henna, and you will get a slightly brighter color--but mostly, you go from lighter to darker. And it can take a lot to make it much DARKER, too-- I have to regularly mix black henna in with my red to get the color on my head that I do, because I am naturally baby-girl white blonde, and it takes a lot of tint to make it RED.
Do not henna the cat. It's all natural, but they will still lick it off and throw up. People will laugh at you if they see you in the dryer hood. You will smell like grass. 9:19 a.m. - 2005-02-04 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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