It wasn't long ago that I said that I would never dye my hair. I would age gracefully. Naturally. Well, that was before The Whitening, also known as the day I noticed kinky long white hairs were popping at a rate too fast for my husband to pluck out of my head while I flossed my teeth.
The search was on for a green environmentally friendly non-toxic alternative to conventional hair dyes. A quick Google search turned up henna as a possible alternative. If I was going to do something as vain as hair colouring, I wasn't about to wash chemicals into the drain to achieve it.
Google's top site was Henna for Hair, which linked to www.hennapage.com. Here I learned about henna. To save you reading time, I will summarize.
Henna is derived from a plant with the latin name lawsonia inermis. Henna by itself is a red-orange dye. The range of colours available is made from mixing henna with other ingredients. One ingredient that can be added is indigo, derived from the plant indigofera tinctoria. This is the same dye that is used to make blue jeans blue.
Henna supposedly penetrates the hair shaft and does not simply coat the hair. You should be able to achieve a fairly permanent effect. My experience did not bear out this claim, as I will discuss below.
Not all henna is created equal. The www.hennaforhair.com site recommended that I buy body art quality henna and mix it myself. As a mother of small children, this option sounded like too much trouble. I did learn, however, that I would need to buy around 200g of henna to cover my medium length hair. Long hair would require 300g and short hair would need 100g. Locally, I could expect to find body art quality henna at the local India town. I just couldn't see myself doing this either. "Hello. Do you have any body art quality henna?" It was a fear of the unknown that led me to make a trip to the shopping mall instead.
A trip to the drug store to buy henna turned up... nothing. There were dozens of different kinds of permanent chemical hair dyes with all the big names, but absolutely no henna products, except some henna shampoo. I was dismayed to finally find henna at my local mall in a Health Store. You know, the kind that sells vitamin supplements, fasting plans in a box, and protein supplements for weight lifters in big plastic jars. You know. The kind of place that I would never set foot in under normal circumstances.
There were no hippies, muscle men, or frighteningly emaciated customers in the store the day I searched for henna. Bingo, there were three different kinds of henna mixes! Two were from the "Light Mountain" company of Twin Lakes, Wisconsin. One was called "Color the Gray!", complete with exclamation mark!, priced at $15 CAD. The other did not claim to "Color the Gray!" so I did not seriously consider it. The last remaining product was from the "Colora" company of Little Ferry, New Jersey. It was the "colora henna creme" all in small caps. In fact, everything on the cover of the box was in small caps. There was a reassuring picture of a plant too, plus the reassurance of "no ammonia" and "no peroxide." This was priced at around $10 CAD. Even more convenient, you can also buy the Colora product at www.well.ca, with free shipping. That online store also carries "Hennalucent" which I have not reviewed for this article.
First I gave the Light Mountain Natural Color the Gray! a whirl. I chose Dark Brown. According to the box, the ingredients are henna and indigo leaf powders, "only the pure botanicals listed above and nothing else." Excellent! Opening the box revealed two bags of powder and instructions with plastic gloves and plastic bag attached to it. The box had a strong pleasant perfume-like scent to it. This was NOT what the powder smelled like, when I opened the bags. I can only describe the scent as being like in a Chinese store, like sandalwood.
After reading the instructions, I was a little scared and a lot intimidated. I was working with a semi-permanent dye! I was going to do this alone! I prepared by putting on a full robe made of dark purple fleece and safety pinning a burgundy towel around my neck. I put vaseline on my ears, neck and all around the hairline as suggested in the instructions. I wasn't about to risk having my clothes or skin turn colour from my sloppiness. The entire operation would be done while crouched in my dry big jacuzzi tub.
What I did not do was a test strand. I am not allergic to anything of any significance and I do not have chemically treated hair. I doubted that anything would go wrong.
There are fairly detailed instructions, but here they are in a nutshell. There are two separate powders, labelled "STEP 1" and "STEP 2". You need to mix the powders with boiled distilled water (distilled being highlighted in bold) to the consistency of yogurt in non-metallic bowls and let them sit for a time to "cure." I used filtered tap water, but I felt that the risk of some unforeseen chemical reaction was unlikely with our great local water supply. I used a plastic spoon to mix in glass bowls. Also, to save time you can mix STEP 1 and STEP 2 in separate bowls, rather than doing them in sequence as you require them.
There are some ingredients you can add to the mixes:
Condition: 2T yogurt or 1 egg
Golden highlights: use half warm lemon juice or chamomile tea
Golden or copper highlights: 3T vinegar or lemon juice
Enrich brown or red: 1t ginger, allspice, nutmeg or paprika
Enhance brown: replace water with old black very warm coffee
You apply STEP 1 to your clean, towel dried hair in sections (using non-metallic hair clips), cover your hair with the provided plastic cap (which I secured with a wooden clothes pin), and leave it on for up to 15 minutes, checking every 5 minutes, applying "intermittent heat." My heat source was a hair dryer on warm setting. Rinse it out with water, then towel dry it. I read reviews of this product online and read a recommendation to fill the tub with water and immerse my whole head and body in the tub of water to help rinse it out. Afraid of getting dye on my skin, I first rinsed off with the shower spray attachment in the tub before filling the tub with water and lying down in the water.
Now, this whole process is INCREDIBLY MESSY. You've got this slop falling out of your hair in clumps as you keep applying more. There is no way to avoid getting this stuff on your wrists and your face, but I found that if I rinsed soon after slopping it on, it didn't leave much of a mark. A wetted corner of the towel around my neck to wipe off slopped bits worked quite well. The clumps fell everywhere, including all over the tub with some bits ending up on the rim of the tub, who knows how. These were easily rinsed off with some warm water later without staining the white tub surface. Also, you have to remember to rinse off your gloves after you've applied STEP 1 because you'll need them again in STEP 2. I ended up getting water down my plastic gloves (too short!), but my hands didn't stain at all since I rinsed after.
STEP 1 was the henna, I think. STEP 2 was probably the indigo, or at least it was in my case.
STEP 2 is pretty much the same as STEP 1. However, it "could take up to 3 or 4 hours to achieve the desired colour" for STEP 2. Yikes!!!
The whole process took me about 3 hours from start to finish, not including curing the powders, but it could have taken much longer had I not had to hurry off to pick up one of kids from school. I cut short STEP 2 just a wee bit. The rinsing took a considerably long time. I tried to wait until the water rinsed fairly cleear, but this meant filling and refilling the tub at least three times. It never did run absolutely clear, but the first shampoo post-dye would take out the rest of it.
You are asked to avoid washing your hair for at least 24 hours. The henna makes the hair smell like wet hay. It is not entirely unpleasant. This smell lingers for days. I did not see any colour transfer onto my pillow, but I did take the precaution of sleeping on a dark coloured towel unti I had the chance to wash my hair.
The package contained 197g of "100% PURE BOTANICAL HAIR COLOR", which was perfect for my shoulder length hair. There was probably enough for longer hair, if I was more careful about application and slopped less.
So, how did it turn out?
The white hairs appear lighter than the other hairs, but they appear like highlights. What I love about this colouring is that it lasts for around 3 months before the colour fades enough to notice the white hairs again. I have dark brown hair with natural red highlights, and less than 1% white hairs. I know that I had previously written that henna is supposedly permanent, but indigo is less so. Perhaps that explains why the colour does not last until the hairs fall out. The gradual fading means that I never have to touch up my roots. Now, I wash my hair almost daily because I exercise heavily, so the colour might last longer for you.
Despite the mess, I feel that the whole henna process was worth the trouble. Any mess was easily cleaned up by spraying down the bathtub and washing my bathrobe and towel. I also take comfort in knowing that henna is "good" for my hair, unlike commercial chemical dyes. Perhaps you could recruit a friend to do a henna night. That might make it easier. It was certainly challenging to slop on the henna without seeing myself in the mirror.
Next, in Part 2, we look at the Colora Henna Creme.
