Budget Beauty - DIY Blonde Highlighting

Most people who get their hair highlighted and especially blondes will tell you it's quite an expensive thing to upkeep, when it came time that my roots were a little out of control it needed to be done but I didn't quite have the spare cash to do it I decided to give at home highlighting a go.

So a bit about how I usually get my hair highlighted, I generally switch between half and full heads of foils and in winter get a few darker blonde bits foiled through and in summer have it all the same lighter blonde. Generally my hair can cost me anywhere between $185-$250 a time.

This is the kit I decided to use



It cost me about $18 from Coles, I've also seen it in Priceline etc. I chose this one because it seemed like the most fail safe and I didn't really want to go about trying to foil my own hair or doing an all over blonde colour. The kit includes a streaking cap, hook, the colour & developer etc and a conditioner to use afterwards.

I also bought a couple of additional things - Tinting Brush (cost me around $3 from priceline) since I was only doing regrowth I wanted to be quite precise, Metal Streaking Cap Hook ($4 from Hairhouse Warehouse) LIFESAVER! The plastic hook provided in the kit is a piece of shit, seriously if you intend on trying a kit like this buy a metal hook! I also made sure I had a few old towels and tons of hair clips to section the hair as well.

Hair Before -



So what you need to do is put the cap on and pull your hair through the holes, there are indicators on the cap for if you only want to highlight a certain part of your hair, since my hair is quite blonde all over I decided at first i'd do the whole cap... This was until I actually started pulling my hair through (by myself). It was taking fricken forever so I ended up just doing the top part and sides and left the underneath.

IMPORTANT! You need to make sure you pull out the entire strand of hair or you end up with what I have now fondly called tiger stripes...sadly I did make this mistake on a few strands of my hair... Lesson learnt!

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="588" caption="Hair pulled through, no makeup and not a happy face after this took forever!"][/caption]

Once your hair is pulled through (properly!) I combed through the hair to make sure no pieces were snagged and then mixed my colour and applied it to my roots only.

I waited around 40mins and then applied some more colour to my ends (so it'd look even). I'd read when it was the colour of the inside of a banana skin that's when it's done so I went by this and washed it out at around 50mins.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="588" caption="Waiting... Waiting.."][/caption]

Then it was time to wash out.. HURRAH! I decided to wash my hair with the cap still on and also condition it so it would slide out a bit easier, it was still a bit of a bitch to get off but wasn't too terrible. Then after drying my hair came the moment of truth...did it work? was it perfect? Yes and No. My regrowth obviously wasn't as noticable but the strands i'd dyed around the crown of my head weren't great, in fact I think I was being a little conservative with how much I was pulling through because when I checked the sides of my hair it was perfect and that's where i was getting a little more careless and pulling through more hair.

So my lessons learnt - Make sure hair is pulled through properly (yep I have some tiger stipes...ROAR!), Pull through more hair in the crown so it's more noticable in the part.

Will I do it again? Most likely, I may use it as an option in between salon highlights just to try and keep the costs down, however I do kind of want to perfect it... that's the Virgo in me talking!

RESULTS! As you can see...not 100% but as a first attempt i'm not overly concerned and it's definitely given me a bit more time to save up for a salon trip :)