Bleach Blondes Beware

I grew up in a beauty salon. My grandmother the owner; my mother the manager and head cosmetologist. I would go to the salon every day after school. I could put my own acrylic nails on by the time I was in 7th grade. My family took turns cutting and coloring each others hair and doing each others nails and toes.

I am a natural blonde, but loved the way bleach blonde hair looked. So I decided I wanted to start bleaching my hair. I had experience in this kind of thing so I knew I would be fine. My hair was to my lower back and everyone always complimented me on how beautiful it was.

My mother told me to be careful. “Don’t leave the bleach on too long, or your hair will melt off.” I figured she meant that if my hair was going to react, it would do it right then and start falling out.

I was so wrong. What happens when you bleach your hair is that you use developer. 20, 30, 40 volume etc… So if, when you are doing your roots, you let any of the already bleached hair get the new bleach on it, you are processing that hair more. So over the course of time, if you bleached your hair five times and used 30 volume developer each time, you have put 1500 volume developer on the same piece(s) of hair.

After about three years of bleaching my hair, it finally gave up. My hair would break off in chunks at my shoulders when I brushed it. After about a month of the breakage, I decided to cut my hair above my shoulders.

There is a product called OJON. It is made mainly of palm nut oil. They have all sorts of different things, from shampoo and conditioner to a type of cream you put on your hair. Ojon is expensive but it lasts a long time and works miracles. During the time my hair was breaking, I had to wait a day after taking a shower to be able to brush through it at all. After doing one treatment on my hair, I was able to brush it even after showers for over a week. Of coarse it was not able to completely cure the damage I had done to my hair, but it helped out a lot. Even if you just have dry hair, this stuff is wonderful, I highly recommend it.