Michele Marino, Inventory supervisor, Mehandi.com

Henna was not my first choice to dye my hair, mostly because the people I saw using henna had orange hair. Not my best look. Before I started working at Mehandi, a friend introduced me to the Ancient Sunrise Rajasthani Twilight Henna products. She uses the Ancient Sunrise Rajasthani Twilight Henna and her hair is a beautiful red, not orange at all.

For about twenty years, I was using commercial chemical dyes. For a while, I was getting blonde highlights every four weeks for about two years. When, I finally ditched that guy who liked blondes I wanted to go back to my natural medium brunette hair. It took a lot of applications of chemical at-home boxed dye to get a brown that wouldn’t fade due to me being blond for so long. I had hair that was shoulder length and I was using two boxes of dye at a time. After one of my applications, I became ill. I had a headache, my eyes were puffy, and my muscles ached terribly. My neck muscles were ropey and I was in a lot of pain. A chiropractor and a massage therapist told me my body was filled with toxins. We determined it was the applications of the dark hair dye. When I started working here at Mehandi, I immediately identified with the paper on PPD sensitivity from black henna and black hair dye written by Catherine Cartwright-Jones, the founder of Mehandi.com and Ancient Sunrise. By then, I was already using the Ancient Sunrise henna and I eventually started feeling much better.