Hello! Pinky the computer is up and running again and I didn't lose any of my documents. Thank you Dell Datasafe restore or whatever you're called!
So today I have a review for Colour B4 Extra Strength hair dye remover.
You've probably seen reviews for this or similar products on other blogs, these products really became well known within the last year. It's a great idea, if you dye your hair and don't like the result, or get bored of it, or whatever other reason, you apply this stuff and it takes you back to your original colour...In theory.
I'm not going to go into all of the science behind it as I am not smart enough and can't be bothered to read into it properly but it seems the basic idea is that this somehow shrinks the hair dye molecules which releases them from your hair follicles, then when you rinse it away it also rinses off the molecules taking your hair back to it's previous colour. Or something...
Anyway does it work?
Well it had a challenge with my hair. It hasn't been my natural colour (except for the roots) for over 11 years. The closest the poor hair came to a break was when I was about 17 and shaved my head. Since then it's been (that I can remember) bright red, blonde, light pink, ginger, dark red and black so I was not expecting the Colour B4 to perform miracles and get me back to blonde, I just wanted to get rid of enough black to enable me to get back to ginger.
So here I am before applying:
You can see my hair is a sort of washed out black with lighter brown tips
You apply it like any regular hair dye, it comes in a bottle with a spout that you mix the various components in then just apply it to your hair as usual (I am useless on my own so always get someone else to put it on me). Then you just leave it awhile (60 minutes for the extra strength). For it to work you need a warm environment so I wrapped my head in clingfilm, which has the added bonus of stopping clumsy people like me getting it everywhere.
I'm beautiful I know.
After you've given it time to do it's thing it's time to wash it off. Unfortunately this is where it differs from hair dye as unfortunately you can't just rinse until the water runs clear, no, instead you need to rinse for at the very least 5 minutes, with the longer the better basically. When that is done you apply a 'buffer' which I think is like a sort of conditioner to bring your hair back to a normal condition, live it for a minute then rinse it off for at least another 5 minutes. Then you apply the buffer again and rinse it off just like a normal shampoo. Annnnd you're finally done! Phew!
And here are the results:
So you can see it worked quite well! It got rid of all the black leaving me with a slightly darker version of the ginger that was there previously.
However it has one big major con, the smell. This stuff smells absolutely evil. People have said it smells like rotten eggs, I've never smelt one, but to me it smells of stink bombs which I've heard are based on rotten eggs. It's a horrible sulfurous smell and it's strong. To make things worse for the next month or so after using this every time I washed my hair the smell would come back. Something to do with wetting the hair reignites the power of the stench!
Also the rinsing thing was a major hassle for me as we don't have a proper shower, just a shower -head. Which means I couldn't just stand and let the shower rinse it away, instead I had to crouch uncomfortably in my bath holding the shower-head over me for about 20 minutes in total. This left me with a very stiff neck. But if you have a proper shower I'm sure it's a lot easier.
But even with the irritance of the rinsing and the evil smell I would still recommend this. It does work!
There are various other brands of hair dye remover such as Color Oops and a superdrug own brand one (which is meant to be cheaper but I picked up the Colour B4 when it was on a special) and I assume they're the same thing and work the same. It cost me about £9 which is quite expensive but as it's not something you'll need to use regularly it's not that bad.
Has anyone else tried this, or one of the other brands? Did it work for you? How did you cope with having hair of eternal stench?
