Hair Chalking

I mentioned it in brief yesterday but after it arrived today I decided to do a little post on it. And just before I get started can I just say that, no, I am not a hipster; I just love the idea of bright wash out hair dye.

I got a 32 colour box set on ebay for under £9 and I did my sister's hair for her first, she has really dark, really thick hair so I was interested to see if the pastels worked. I used blue and yellow and two of the strands I did can be seen below:

And the finished product, plus a hot pink streak...

After deciding that bright colors worked really well, my sister did my hair with some paler colours (grey/violet/pale yellow) to see what would happen. The results are below...

It left the chalked strands feeling unmanageable and super dry, like they'd been dipped in hairspray and I couldn't brush them as this would remove the chalk, they also looked a bit messier than my sister's (this was probably just due to her skills and lack thereof, she's only 12 bless her!) but the lighter colours still showed up quite well although they did fade faster than my sisters. As for the chalks themselves they were a bit small and more than two or three big uses would probably use them up however there are loads of colours and they were relatively cheap. I would recommend that if you're serious about it that you buy some professional hair chalk but for day to day use the ones I brought were great.

Here's my handy guide on how to apply hair chalk:

1. Take a strand the size of a pencil or a little more
2. Brush it out in whatever way you want it to go
3. Spray enough water on it (or use your finger or a brush) to get the strand damo all over but not dripping but leave it dry if you're blond/have light coloured hair as it will stain
4. Run the chalk down over your hair repeatedly, don't rub up and down
5. Allow to dry until hair barely gives off any colour when touched
6. Straighten or curl, the heat will lock the colour in
7. Finally fic with ahir

But just be warned that this can leave your hair feeling really dry, water will make it run out and it will do so anyway over the day so your clothes may get a little bit of rainbow on them and again don't get your hair wet first if you have blond hair, it will stain for a few days (or maybe longer).