Asian Hair Dying Incident

When staying in a foreign country, you should expect strange and dangerous things to happen at fairly regular intervals. Why? Because all of ones assumptions about how the world works are learned as a child in another country. And guess what? Non-transferrable. 

So although one is always expecting something odd to happen, the nature of each incident is so…unexpected, it's actually impossible to prepare for. Therefore much of life is spent in a state of wide-eyed confusion. 

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For example, the ice cream-man pulls up on his motorbike and wants to sell you ice cream. Yay! It's a hot day (and who says no to ice cream, even on a cold day?!), so you buy. On this occasion, a kind of Malaysian-style Neopolitan - purple for yam, yellow for corn, orange for mangOH NO!! JACKfruit!?! The mango flavour is jackfruit?! <<THROW UP>>  Who eats that??

Although I suppose the lesson here is ASK before you eat. 

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So anyway, I've just had a fairly major "strange incident".

Involving hair dye. 

I'm sure you have a good idea where this is going, but indulge me...and in defence of what follows, I would like to point out, that in all my years of hair dying, even in this country, I have never before had a hair dying "incident".

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I dye my hair fairly often and the majority of the time I do it myself, from a box. Last time I chose a very dark brown, but even with permanent dye the colour fades pretty fast and after a few weeks I'm left with a funny, light, reddish brown. Not nice. 

So it was dying time again and I thought, I like the dark brown but I don't want the red tint. I spent some browsing the options and found a similar colour but with a "golden" highlight, instead of a red one. Nice. Purchased. 

I got home, excited, and began my preparations - old clothes, plastic gloves, dye mixing. All good. Then I squeezed it onto my head and went to read a book.

20 minutes later.  

I went to the bathroom to check progress. I slowly stepped closer to the mirror…huh…my roots, my…most of my hair looks brown but…that's orange at the roots? Literally. Bright orange. I have a bright orange scalp.

0.0

Grab the box. 

Check the pictures on the side. 

Dang. 

So on hair dye boxes they have little panels on the side to show you, if your hair is this colour, it will become, this colour. If your hair is this colour, it will become this colour.

And normally, the pictures go from light to dark. You start with light coloured hair, it becomes dark coloured hair. 

My pictures went from dark to light. 

Asian Hair Dye.

For Asians. With black hair.

Not Mat Salleh. With light brown hair. 

I was bleaching it.

=.=

I washed it off to assess the damage. 

You know the "golden highlight" I wanted in my dark brown hair? Well, now my whole head is the golden highlight.