Real People, Real Henna: "Spira Lee"



Top: chemical brown dye. Middle: after henna. Bottom: after indigo

I have been bleaching highlights into my hair since the beginning of time and hating the results without fail. Generally my hair does not hold dye very well at all, so after a week or so, I end up with an ugly brassy color and fried hair. Here is my hair two weeks after using a dark brown dye to try to even out the color. The brown has already faded and the highlights are looking mighty bad!

After reading lots of mixes on this site, I was a bit undecided what to do, and in the end, I decided to keep it simple for my first treatment, and decided if I wanted to complicate things later on, so I just mixed 100 grema of henna powder with enough water to make a runny sludge (sorry, I didn't measure it) Left it sit for four hours, then put the kids to bed for an hour, and came back downstairs to look at it for a bit before getting it together to glop it on. It had a nice brown sheen over the top of it, and dyed my hand a strong orange, so it was time to go to it. I gathered up some old towels, my roll of saran wrap, and some tin foil. Threw some ugly old sheets on my bed, and went back downstairs to get started.

The mixture was a bit thick, so I stirred in a little more mildly acidic liquid. So that is all- just henna and mildly acidic liquid. Sitting on the orange stool at the kitchen sink, I was able to get about half the henna mixture to cover my hair thoroughly without making too much of a mess of myself. Then I wrapped it all up in saran wrap and made a nice tin foil hat. This is when my ex showed up unexpectedly to visit the kids (durrgh! they are asleep already, you lunk!). So I got to tell him that I was planning on thinking anti war thoughts, and needed to protect myself. Ha!

Covered it all with an old towel and went to bed with about six other old towels. In the middle of the night, I was disturbed by the tin foil rattling my ears so I got up and rinsed it all out...maybe 6 hours on my head:

I liked it, but I wanted black, so I go on. Since I only used about half the henna I mixed up, I decided to only mix up 50 grams of indigo. This was quite a bit more runny and messier. Anyways, I got good results. I kept the indigo on my head for 2 hours. The bottom third of the picture above is the result..

About a week after the above picture, I did the whole process again. Using the leftover henna that I had stored in the freezer, double bagged.

Then a fresh batch of 50 grams indigo, mixed with water and a tablespoon of salt.

I am hoping, over time to get deeper color results, but I am very happy with my hendigo experience :)

Notes and References
Henna: https://www.mehandi.com/Mehandi-com-Ancient-Sunrise-Henna-for-Hair-s/121.htm
Don’t have fruit juice on hand? Keep some fruit acid powders in your cupboard.
Mildly acidic liquid: https://www.mehandi.com/Fruit-Acid-for-henna-dye-release-s/299.htm
More info on mildly acidic mixes: https://www.tapdancinglizard.com/henna-and-acidic-mixes/
Ancient Sunrise henna for hair kits with everything included: https://www.mehandi.com/Mehandi-com-Ancient-Sunrise-Henna-for-Hair-Kits-s/124.htm
Henna time and temperature: https://www.tapdancinglizard.com/mixing-and-testing-your-henna-mix pp. 10-13

Video How-To
Mixing henna and indigo: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/561559371