I decided on a whim (saw some pictures of Gisele on the tube, thought “I want that hair”) to take my hair darker. Being an impatient soul, I wanted it darker – dark! as dark as blonde can be! – right away. But thank goodness for John (Spanton – regular readers will know him by now) who convinced me to do it little by little so that it wasn’t a shock to the system. He also guessed (correctly) that there would be something better suited to my skin colouring and general lifestyle; balayage. Now I have had this technique done before  (you can read about that in this post which has an accompanying video) but this time the effect was slightly different. The top of my hair down to the midlengths has been made darker and richer in tone than usual so that regrowth will be minimal and then light pieces have been added around my face to lift the colour and frame my features.

Here’s my hair BEFORE we started. Do excuse the crazy face – I was pretending that John was pulling out my brains. You had to be there, really…

Here’s my hair after the initial dark base colour had been put on – you can really see a difference!

Here’s the balayage (painting on the highlights free-hand) happening:

…and to see the final thing properly you can watch the following video. (There’s a snapshot of it at the very top of this page for video-phobes.) I do some mane-swooshing and everything – it also features some gigantic bottles of shampoo. The video is entitled How to Change Hair Colour Without Freaking Out – and I do think that this has been a very good step to take before properly going darker. In fact, if I’m honest, I probably won’t go much darker – I love it just the way it is!

 So, video. If you’re on email you’ll need to click here, everyone else just scroll down! Links to things shown in the video are immediately below.

John Spanton is my colourist, he’s at Trevor Sorbie Covent Garden. Their contact details are here: www.trevorsorbie.com

Philip Kingsley Massive Shampoo: http://tidd.ly/25055722
Massive Conditioner! http://tidd.ly/6f5658ea
Sebastien Potion 9: http://tidd.ly/1e7c0962