Take a journey with me, back in time to the 90s. You may or may not remember, but it was a magical time when suddenly you could easily buy green nail polish and weird colored hair dye. My parents wouldn’t let me actually dye my hair, but they were fine with temporary experiments, so I had all kinds of hair mascara and colored pomade. I decided that when I turned 18, I would dye my hair blue. Why blue? Well, I wore a lot of blue, and green, and purple, but I didn’t like green and purple together, so blue seemed like the safest bet for coordinating with my wardrobe. I had it all figured out!
Then I learned that my hair was dark enough that I would have to bleach it, and that blue hair dye had a bad habit of quickly fading to a nasty pool water greenish shade. I gave up on my wild dreams of colored hair and stuck with my boring brown hair.
Until I discovered henna.
I’ve been dying my hair with henna since Autumn 2011, and I’ve been pretty happy with it. My hair looks amazing and is super healthy. No bleach required!
But there were some problems… Henna is messy and time-consuming. Any time I needed to touch up my roots, I’d have to set aside the entire afternoon to do it, and count on spending a good 45 minutes cleaning the bathroom afterwards. I’d often end up with a headache from the sheer weight of the henna mud, which I had to leave on my hair for hours. Not to mention how long I had to spend rinsing it out in the shower, and how much water that took, and me living in a desert.
This leads to me leaving my roots un-tended to for months and months and months.
Meanwhile, my awesome pal Liora and her friend Meagan were over here starting a company called oVertone, which makes color-depositing conditioners to help your dye job stay fresh and vibrant. I thought that was pretty cool, but I’d been told that once you hennaed your hair, fantasy color hair-dye was out of the question. You couldn’t bleach the henna out and the dye molecules had nowhere to go, something something something. When I started hennaing my hair I didn’t care, but then I kept seeing all of these fabulous dye jobs on oVertone’s social media accounts and I felt seriously left out. Why couldn’t I have mermaid hair, too?
Then the other day they posted some strand tests of orange dyes and it looked an awful lot like if I put orange dye on my brown roots, it would be pretty close to the color of my henna, without all the hassle of henna. I broached the subject with Liora, and she agreed my hair was probably just light enough for the orange dye. We talked a bit about the interaction between henna and hair dye, and how they’d had customers who were curious whether they could put oVertone over henna.
These thoughts milled around in my head until one day I had a realization… I have basically all the hair in the world and I’m really overdue to trim my ends. Why not put oVertone on the last 6 inches of my hair, that way if it looked bad, I could just cut it off, and Liora and Meagan would have a clear answer for their customers. WE COULD DO SCIENCE TO MY HAIR!
While mermaid colors were still out of the question (teal + henna = blargh), I went over to Liora’s place and we applied Extreme Pink and Vibrant Orange to my ends. Did you know that pink and orange used to be my two least-favorite colors? I’m trying to grow as a person. Anyway, if you want to see what my dyed and curled ends looked like, hop over to the oVertone blog to read Liora’s post.
I was so excited that I couldn’t resist when Liora generously offered to let me take the rest of the Go Deep conditioner home and put it on the rest of my hair. I wanted magical raspberry sunset hair and I was going to make it happen.
So let’s talk about what oVertone is like. Although it’s designed to be used to maintain an existing dye job, there’s enough dye in the Go Deep product that you can use it to color your natural hair, assuming your base color is light enough. Since it doesn’t have alcohol in it like most dyes do, it’s easier on your hair, which is nice for dye-wusses like me. Hair health takes priority over hair color when you have bootie-length locks.
Go Deep comes in a tub and looks kind of like frosting, and smells minty fresh because it’s got mint and rosemary oils in it.
The cool thing for me is that the process for applying oVertone Go Deep is the same as applying henna — spread that stuff all over your head! The difference is that because it’s not as thick and heavy, it didn’t slide off all over the bathroom floor, and it didn’t weigh my head down. Plus I only had to leave it on for 15 minutes, not 2 hours. I thought I’d spend that time reading, but actually, by the time I finished wiping up the mess I had made, it was time to hop in the shower and rinse off.
And yes, it did make a mess. I have a ton of hair, so there’s basically no way to cover all of it with dye without getting it everywhere. I managed to restrict the carnage to my sink, a couple of random splats on the counter, and my own body. But fear not! I just scrubbed myself really well and the color came right off. I do recommend having an exfoliating cleaner on hand just in case, though.
I really wanted a variegated raspberry and orange look, so I sectioned my hair into six pieces and alternated which color I applied, and then wrapped them all together on top of my head so they’d blend. On my scalp, I did some places orange and some places pink, which resulted in a more patchy look, so I’m going to go back in and apply more color and blend it together to smooth it out.
The end result is that my previously natural-looking red hair now has this rich berry hue with flashes of coppery orange. I like it a lot! But best of all, because Go Deep is a deep conditioner, my hair also feels amazing! It’s very soft and still looks and feels really healthy. It took longer to rinse out than a normal shampoo and conditioner, obviously, but not nearly as long as henna does, and it didn’t leave mud all over my shower.
I do have a couple of concerns about continuing to use oVertone. One is that it doesn’t seem to cover my greys as well as henna does. I’m going to make doubly sure to hit my tiny grey patch with some extra color when I redo my roots, because you can definitely see my grey roots. If I can get them to be a pastel pink or orange, that’s fine, but I don’t want actual white showing at my roots, so if that becomes an issue I may have to keep using henna.
The other issue is cost. Henna isn’t cheap, but I didn’t have to apply it often. Because oVertone is semi-permanent, I’ll need to invest in the Daily Conditioner to keep my color bright, and then re-apply Go Deep every week or so. For the average person this is not going to add up to a huge expense, but did I mention that I have ALL THE HAIR? I used close to half of each tub to dye my hair, and while I can probably use less in the future (since I’ll just be looking to re-up my baseline dye job), I’m worried it could get expensive fast. It’s an expense I can currently handle, but if things change in my budget, I may have to let my hair color go, or experiment with seeing how stingy I can be with product while still maintaining my color.
Over all though, I am really happy and really excited about my new hair color! It really looks good with my complexion, since it’s still in the same red-orange family as my henna, it’s just gone a couple of steps beyond colors normally found in nature. It definitely fits well with the otherworldly, faerie persona that I like to bring to the stage, while not being out of line with any vintage-inspired costuming I might want to wear.