I’ve been experimenting with using chalk pastels to temporarily colour my hair. A few other tutorials suggest you use special hair chalk, which I think you can only buy over in America. But I bought some pretty art pastels at the art shop for literally $1.70 each, and they work pretty well!
Warning!
This stuff DOES DAMAGE YOUR HAIR, especially if you don’t take the proper precautions I suggest in this tutorial. Any kind of chalk is drying and will make your hair a bit stiff and weird. Proceed with caution! Please don’t do this every week!
Let the tutorial commence.
Start with clean hair. Comb your hair through, make it nice and neat, and style it in your usual way. I’m always side-parted.
Next, put some moisturising stuff on your hair. I’m using Schwartzkopf Hair Elixr or something. It’s really pretty and makes my hair silky. It’s a kind of oil. This is super important.
These are the pastels I’m using! Make sure you don’t get oil pastels! You can tell if it’s chalk pastels because it comes off on your hands easily in a kind of dust. Oil pastels feel… oily.
Wet the strand of hair you want to colour. If you don’t wet it, you’ll find it really hard for the colour to take. Some people think that wetting your hair will make the colour dye, but it’s either that or have no colour at all. You’ll probably need to re-wet the hair a few times before you’re done. Pastels suck up so much water.
Next advice: twist! This means that the hair isn’t smooth and therefore it rubs more pigment off the pastel. It can make it hard to get all the hair coloured though.
You will get it all over your hands, but it washes off. Don’t be so precious!
Try to refrain from rubbing UP the hair, as this will damage it a lot and give you billions of split endz. Nice downward strokes. Like you’re stroking a cat.
You can stop at once side and look weird.
I ended up putting a pink and blue streak through my fringe, some pink at the sides and blue tips. It looked pretty pigmented when I first did it! The blue was really strong at first.
Now wait for it to dry. Don’t brush it til after it’s dry or all your colour will come out. Once dry, put some more moisturiser through it, since it will feel strawy and stiff until you do. Comb carefully.
Mine dried with a nice soft pink, and the blue pretty much wore off. I can hardly see any blue in my hair at all!
There’s a bit in my fringe I guess.
I like wearing my hair pinned back at the sides when it’s coloured. Pretty!
From my last experiment with this stuff, I learned that you can wash nearly all of the pigment out on your first shampoo. I was left with an extremely subtle peachy colour from the pink, and the blue completely washed out. If you have darker hair, I’m sure it will immediately wash out, and if you have lighter hair than me, it might stay in a bit longer. But I’m pretty sure that this is not permanent on anyone!
Christina Hopgood 