Crazy Color Mega Swatch Party
I have been wanting to write hair reviews for years now. I have been saving packages and taking pictures for so long my hard drive started getting clogged with all this unused stuff.
The reason why I haven't written any is probably because I have never written about hair (besides this one post here) and that it is quite hard and complicated to do so. Also, I am not a professional hairdresser and giving people advice about bleaching and dying hair is a tricky subject.
I get asked about my hair so much though and instead of repeating my methods and experiments over and over I thought I should just write about them. So these are not necessarily instructions on what to do but explanations of what I have done. I like experimenting with hair and have been doing so since I was a teen. I usually have great results but making mistakes is part of the project. So I will share those mistakes with you as well so that hopefully you don't have to.
There will be quite a few posts which I will announce below in case you are interested in one but not the others (aka it saves you some reading time!).
Today I will ease into the subject by simply having hair color swatches. I say simply since it is less complicated than the other posts but describing hair colors is anything but simple.
The reason I bought crazy colors in the first place was that I was not happy with Directions. They were much more expensive in Germany than the US and their lasting power is not too good on my hair. Besides I wanted to try out something else and Crazy Colors has a shade selection that I found more appealing than Directions.
I really liked working with this brand but I confess that my favourite Vegetable based dye brands are Special Effects and Stargazer. The reason why I didn't use them is that they are either too expensive or too hard to find. Also, thy are so excellent since both brands are so pigmented that you can get a good color result on darker hair and they are also the most long lasting vegetable dyes I have ever used. Since my hair is bleached to an 11 base (the lightest you can bleach your hair to) I really didn't need/want a strong dye.
I wanted my hair to be white most of the times and occasionally color it in powdery hues. TO achieve that you need very very light dyes that also wash out relatively fast (not after one wash though) so that I can switch the colors around and not stain my super porous hair to the point where it won't go back to a clean white.
Now you may wonder why I have stronger colors in my arsenal. Well, first off you can mix the colors with conditioner to create pastel hues and secondly I also dyed Johnny Clyde's hair who had stronger colors for a while.
So here are the swatches and my feeble attempts to describe the colors and the results.
Unfortunately, I don't have any strand test to show you since I never used the colors straight on our hair and have thrown out the strand tests I did myself ( I know how could I!), the other reason is that I also don't have enough dye for some of them to do a strand test.
These shades can be used on a medium to dark base (6 - 11)
Violette
Sky Blue
Looks practically like Capri Blue and I honestly did not see much of a difference. It is meant to be lighter but I thought it was more or less just as bright. It also looks to be quite purplish but fades to Aqua green as well. Both these shades do not wash out ever once they get to the Aqua stage.
Capri Blue
These can be used on a medium to light base (8-11)
Lavender
A bright pastel purple-pink shade. It looks very purple but it has a strong pink base.
Candy Floss
A bright pastel pink. I bought this after I realized that Marshmallow was too light to mix. It is a pastel shade but is definitely bright when freshly dyed. It is not suitable to be used for a powdery hue unmixed. It is a neutral pink shade.
Honorable mention Lilac
I don't know where my Lilac color ended up so I can't swatch it here. But I had it and used it quite a lot so I thought I should include it here. It is a bright pastel purple shade with a string blue base. it is very pretty and does not fade to green. It is a good shade to use when your hair is a little too yellow since it can counteract some of the orange, and counteract the yellow without going green.
These have to be used on the lightest base (11)
Platinum
It looks grey on the website but I found it to be almost like a white toner but a little stronger. Depending on your base shade it can go either white or silver but it is a very light faint silver color.
Silver
To me, this is their white toner. Even though I have had completely white hair I was never able to achieve an actual silver (aka light grey) color with this. It only works as a white toner for super duper light hair only.
Marshmallow
Have you tried any of these colors? How did they turn out?
