colourist to the stars

I have been promising to highlight Gypsy Tart's hair for ages and actually got round to doing it today. I think that the impetus may have come from 'The Sturdy Soapbox' (I still haven't learned how to do the linky thing, but he's on the links page). Now, colouring hair is something that I am really good at. I have never trained as a hairdresser or colourist and I sometimes regret this as I could have probably earned more money from this than spending all those years at University. I am particularly good at extremely subtle highlights, sometimes using a couple of colours, and when I've done them you don't have to worry about noticeable regrowth.

Highlights are very easy if you are patient and dexterous. All you need is hair dye, a brush and some foil. I even have my own little kit. I realise that this is a little strange as I never colour my hair and hardly ever bother a hairdresser, but highlights fascinate me.

Back to Gypsy Tart's hair. She has mid brown hair with very fine light brown highlights around the crown as the last time I got lazy and couldn't be bothered to spend the usual three hours doing a perfect job on the whole lot. Her hair looked fine, but we had spoken about a month ago about putting some very fine blonde highlights just on the top layers of her hair for a natural 'look what happened to me in the sun' feel.

Given the difficulty of going from mid brown to blonde in one go, we were using peroxide. We planned carefully where to put the colour and I gathered up the finest strands, coated them in bleaching gloop and covered them in foil. Gypsy Tart cleaned up a little bit and then decided to wash up a few dishes. Something made me do a quick check on the first strands only to reveal that they were white.

We ripped the foil from her head and washed the whole lot off. It was only then that the truth was revealed. Those carefully selected individual strands had somehow managed to join up in patches to give a slightly striped effect. Now I'm not saying she looked like a tiger or anything, but it was noticeable that she had colour in her hair. I had failed. I consider it a triumph when people say to Gypsy Tart that she looks nice, but cannot say what is different. In fact a (good) hairdresser asked her if she had highlights when cutting her hair, then who had done them and was amazed that it was her not so humble non trained sister. This won't be happening again. I have actually made her swear not to tell anyone it was me.

Please don't think that I have made my sister look like a freak. I have seen people happy with worse highlights and pleased that they got change out of seventy quid. But our standards are higher. I was going to be a celebrity colourist. Now the dream is dead.