DIY Ombre Hair

I volunteered to help my aunt with a DIY ombre hair project. She had shoulder length hair that has been colored and bleached numerous times. This time, she wanted to try an ombre look. She just wanted the tips bleached blonde so that if she decides she wasn't so crazy about the style after all, it would be easy to just chop off the bleached parts. This was the peg we were going for...

Here's my aunt's hair before we started. As seen below, it's was colored brown a few weeks ago.

Our plan was to keep her general hair color and simply bleach the ends. We bought this Palty bleaching kit for that very purpose. Palty is a Japanese brand and it is sold in most drugstores in Singapore. This is the lightest bleaching kit that is available (this is quite different from the Palty hair dyes, which come in a pink box).

The box comes with everything you'll need to bleach short hair. I was told that if you wanted to bleach medium to long hair, you'll have to get at least two boxes of the bleaching kit. But since we were only going to bleach the ends of my aunt's hair, we just bought one kit. We followed the instructions for mixing the bleach but instead of mixing everything, we only mixed in one half of each ingredient.

Instead of using the comb applicator that came with the kit, we used a bowl and brush applicator that my aunt already had. We didn't want to start from one side and work towards the other side because we didn't want one side to be lighter than the other side. So, I just used the brush to apply the bleach to random chunks of hair from the ends to about an inch and a half from the ends. We let the bleach work for 20 minutes. Afterwards, I reapplied some more bleach from the ends to around two and a half inches from the ends. We let the bleach work for another 20 minutes.

Here's my aunt's hair right before she rinsed out the bleach. Although it's not that noticeable yet, the ends already look a bit lighter than the rest of her hair.

Here's what her hair looks like after shampooing, conditioning, and drying. As seen below, there isn't a hard line where the bleached hair starts. The bleached effect is gradual, because we did the double application that I described above.

The product (Palty bleach) we used was super easy to use. The process was similar to most other hair dyes. However, we found the bleach incredibly drying. It was necessary to deep condition the hair every now and then to avoid brittleness and breakage. Still, the effect is pretty amazing, huh?

In Singapore, I found that a lot of girls already have ombre hair. However, I haven't seen a lot of Filipinos try out this style. So, are you going to try out this trend?