Advertisement
My natural color is a medium brown with both golden and reddish tones in the sun. I love my color but have been dyeing it for years to cover the grays (I started getting a lot of them in my early 20s!). I've been wanting to make the switch to a more natural hair color solution like henna for a while now, but have been hesitant because I don't want to go red, but I don't want to end up too dark either (which I've read on forums tends to happen over time when using both henna and indigo). I really just want to cover the grays and otherwise leave my natural color alone. I've tried several henna gloss recipes with no luck. After scouring this tribe and the hennaforhair.com forums for months I finally found a posting with a recipe that sounded promising (tinyurl.com/rxk6eq) so I ordered the supplies I needed and tried it out last night.
THE RECIPE AND TECHNIQUE:
I used SusyQ's recipe that I linked to above. This recipe is just enough to do your roots, so if you want to do all your hair, you'll need to increase the amounts accordingly. (And for anyone who's wondering, the purpose of the gelatin in this mix is to act as a thickener, which makes a nice creamy mix resulting in less drips.)
Here are the ingredients:
2 - 2 1/4 oz. packets of unflavored gelatin (one box usually has 4 packets)
6 oz. of water
2 Tbs of Henna (I used Yemen henna from mehandi.com)
2 Tbs of Indigo (I also got this from mehandi.com)
After boiling the water, I turned off the burner and slowly added the gelatin to the pot of water, stirring until dissolved. Then I stirred in the henna, followed by the indigo, mixing until everything was blended well. I let this sit for 1.5 hours for color release and then put the mix into a plastic carrot bag (an applicator bottle would work, too). I applied the mix to my roots ONLY, covered my head with a plastic cap and left it on for 30 minutes, no more, no less.
THE RESULTS:
I was so happy with how well this worked that I just had to share! I had beautiful golden highlights where my grays used to be, and the brown hair remained its natural color. I followed up with a conditioning treatment of Cassia for an hour (since 30 minutes isn't enough time for the conditioning benefits of henna to work), and wow! My hair is soft, shiny and gray-free! And the whole process, including the Cassia, took about 4 hours. I'm hooked!
THE RECIPE AND TECHNIQUE:
I used SusyQ's recipe that I linked to above. This recipe is just enough to do your roots, so if you want to do all your hair, you'll need to increase the amounts accordingly. (And for anyone who's wondering, the purpose of the gelatin in this mix is to act as a thickener, which makes a nice creamy mix resulting in less drips.)
Here are the ingredients:
2 - 2 1/4 oz. packets of unflavored gelatin (one box usually has 4 packets)
6 oz. of water
2 Tbs of Henna (I used Yemen henna from mehandi.com)
2 Tbs of Indigo (I also got this from mehandi.com)
After boiling the water, I turned off the burner and slowly added the gelatin to the pot of water, stirring until dissolved. Then I stirred in the henna, followed by the indigo, mixing until everything was blended well. I let this sit for 1.5 hours for color release and then put the mix into a plastic carrot bag (an applicator bottle would work, too). I applied the mix to my roots ONLY, covered my head with a plastic cap and left it on for 30 minutes, no more, no less.
THE RESULTS:
I was so happy with how well this worked that I just had to share! I had beautiful golden highlights where my grays used to be, and the brown hair remained its natural color. I followed up with a conditioning treatment of Cassia for an hour (since 30 minutes isn't enough time for the conditioning benefits of henna to work), and wow! My hair is soft, shiny and gray-free! And the whole process, including the Cassia, took about 4 hours. I'm hooked!
posted by:
|
Los Angeles
|
Advertisement
Advertisement
