Naturally I am a medium brown hair colour but in summer I always have the desire to go lighter! I however, hate going to the hairdressers and simply after being on a student budget for the past three years, I never want to spend a fortune on dying my hair when I can do it myself at home! I am no hair expert whatsoever, but I have been dying my own hair since I was sixteen (I'm 21 now) and have tried red, plum, auburn, black and dark brown, testing out most of the branded hair dyes on the Superdrug shelves!
Quest for summer hair...
In my quest to go lighter this summer I thought I would firstly use the L'OREAL Casting Sunkissed Jelly as it is such a simple concept and I had used it last summer and really liked it. I covered my dry hair with the jelly and left it in - simple! The instructions suggest sitting out in the sun or using a hair dryer to activate the ingredients with the heat so I blow dried my hair, put it up in a bun and left it in over night. The next day I washed and dried my hair as normal and I could tell my hair already looked a little lighter, just a subtle hint as if I had been out in the sun.
My hair beforehand, medium brown with red undertones.
After using the Sunkissed Jelly, a natural looking hint of blonde! (excuse the bare face!)
The product suggests only using on hair that has never been dyed and that is a shade between blonde -dark blonde. As you can see, I am neither of those things! But I thought I'd give it a go anyway as I thought it would provide me with a nice base to carry on my lightening experiment, which it did. Overall I would definitely recommend the product if you are around medium brown or lighter as it does give you a lovely subtle sunkissed look, and basically does what it says on the bottle! Of course, if your hair is naturally blonde, the results will be more visable. It is around £5.99 for a 100ml bottle and does say you can use it a number of times, however if you have shoulder length hair or longer, you are going to use the whole bottle in one go for sure. So bare that in mind in case you get half way through using it and run out! This comes in 3 different shades depending on what your base hair colour is, and can be used as an all over lightener, on strands for highlights or on the ends of hair to achieve an ombre effect. This is a great product to use on holiday too! Simply leave it on whilst you are sunbathing and wash out later on!
Phase 2...
Moving on to the L'oreal Paris Preference Glam Bronde. I seen this advertise at the start of summer and was intrigued by the 'bronde' phrase! So I ordered a box online (well 2 by accident! So if anyone wants to buy an unopened box in shade 02 for blonde hair for £2.50 leave me a comment!) Anyways, I bought shade 03, again for dark blondes/light brown which was around £6.00 from Boots. This advertises as being an easy way to lighten your hair at home, and the concept of using the professional highlighter brush included is easy, however when you actually come to use it, it's not as simple as it looks!
The instructions are easy to follow, as you basically mix up the applicator and bleach sachet, pour an even strip of the mix on each part of the brush and lightly brush down starting from the roots, all the way to the tip in the sections where you want to highlight. The first thing I noticed about using this is that it smells reaaaally strong! But this was no surprise as it is bleach! I soon got the hang of using the brush but felt it left it a bit streaky as some parts of the strip of hair got more product than others. After I had applied the mix on the areas I wanted highlighting, I left it on for around 30 mins (instructions say 25-45 mins depending on desired outcome). I then simply washed the bleach out with just water, then used the L'oreal shampoo included to cleanse my hair. After drying my hair I freaked out a bit as there were some chunks of hair that were quite blonde, however this was down either me using the brush heavy handedly, or the brush just being pretty crap! However, I just blended the hair into my layers when I styled it so it wasn't obvious, and I was more than happy with the rest of the highlights!
This is the result of the highlighter after a few washes, a light brown, with some blonder streaks.
A week or so after using this product, I went on holiday and so lots of sun + my freshly highlighted hair = free extra highlights from the sun rays! This made my hair much lighter which I was really happy about as people started to notice my highlights more and so the result of the L'oreal product was heightened by the sun. The lighting on these pics made me a little ghostly...
Overall I would recommend this product as an alternative for spending a fortune on highlights at the hairdressers. Obviously my end result isn't as professional or blended as well as it would have been if done by a hairdresser, even though when I got my hair trimmed my hair dresser said i'd done a good job ;) I'd sugest getting someone to help you with applying the product as the brush is tricky to work with, but you do (kind of) get the hang of it. Check out the different shades on the boots website here:
(PS. this is the one I have for sale)
(This is the shade I used)
I had my hair the colour in the image above for the majority of the summer, however I do get bored easily and have recently returned to a dark brown. Although 'bronde' could be on the cards again for next summer...
Current hair colour ^
I hope you enjoyed this long (and somewhat rambly) review of both products, feel free to leave me any further questions if you are thinking about trying either.
-Love Katy.
