A Professional Opinion

So I went to Bleach on London's Kingsland Road last night to ask about the best way to approach the dyed-to-grey transition.  While it is tempting to eschew dye altogether, I do think that as my roots start to come through in a more noticeable way, it is going to start looking less than ideal.  Bleach is a rather intimidatingly trendy salon, but they have an excellent reputation as bleach experts.  There was a cute dog in there as well:

I rather naively assumed that the hairdressers at Bleach would just be able to dye my hair the same colour as my roots, and after about a year of having the artificial bits cut off every so often, I would eventually have hair that was all my natural colour.  As with most things in life, it is not as simple as that.  I have been dyeing my hair every couple of months for about 15 years, and it has been every colour of the rainbow, from jet black to bright red.  This means that there are layers and layers of dye on my hair follicles, that would need to be broken through before there would be a good enough base colour to take a grey dye.  The first thing that they did at the salon was take a few strands out of my hair in order to perform a bleach test on it.  Then they did an allergy test by putting some dye on a small area behind my ear, and then I went on my merry way.  A few hours later I had a text from the stylist who did my consultation, with a picture of the strands that had been bleached.  They were orange.  Unfortunately this means that it would probably take several attempts to get all of the colour out of my hair, which not only would cost a fortune, but would also be very damaging to my hair.  They've invited me back in to discuss other options, so I will keep you posted on that.

Lucky for me, I have a very good friend who is a Vidal Sassoon trained stylist.  I told him what happened and he wasn't really surprised.  Until very recently my hair was pillar-box red, which is apparently 'the devil', as it is a complete pain to get rid of on the hair shaft, which is ironic as it fades very quickly between dye touch-ups!  What my hairdresser friend suggested is to start with some highlights - just low peroxide and a small amount of bleach - to start lifting the colour out of my hair, and to help the roots to blend with the rest of my hair a little better.  This would be more of a gradual process, and it would look artificial at first, but hopefully over time I would be a nice natural silver-grey colour.  It would probably work in my favour to chop some of it off as well.  The alternative is to just let the roots grow out and stop being a wimp!