Things you only know if you're not a natural blonde

It's not easy being (fake) blonde

The dark eyebrow trend was a god-send

Praise any deity of your choice for Cara Delevingne. Before Cara there was a very serious suggestion that alongside dying your hair you also needed to lighten your eyebrows. Luckily blondes with dark eyebrows like Billie Piper and Cara made the contrast look a thing. Face bleach not needed. 

Snapping happens. A lot. 

It's always nice when you sit down in the hairdresser's chair, they take one look at your hair and wince. We all know bleach isn't good for hair, but the telling off isn't much fun. Brushing your hair and finding a shower of snapped off hairs, being able to pass a boring commute pulling split ends apart, hair that's in terrible condition is the gift that keeps on giving. 

Purple shampoo is your best friend 

Especially if you live somewhere with nasty hard water. Showering, hair products and pollution can all turn your icy blonde to a yellowy-orange hue (not what you wanted). Luckily, purple shampoo, originally favoured by those with grey hair, will offset yellowing and turn it back to the freshly coloured shade you wanted. Genius. 

You don't want to know how long you've spent in the hair dresser.

A whole head can take up to three hours, and even a half head takes two hours. Which means that a life-long faux blonde will probably spend close to two hundred hours sitting in the salon chair. That's a whole lot of staring at yourself in the mirror thinking about how cruelly unflattering those black robe things are. 

...Or how much you've spent. 

You could probably have bought a house with all the money you've spent on highlights. Well. Not a house, but a really fancy holiday, or a really rubbish car. Seriously: call it £100 a time, with four trips to the salon a year and in ten years of you'll have dropped four grand on being blonde. 

But if you decide to grow out your blonde? 

You'll learn pretty quickly that dark roots = perma grease. Most pseudo blondes will have had a moment when she decides she's too broke for new 'lights, or that she wants to give her poor follicles a break. Sadly, it's not that easy. Even if your hair is perfectly clean, a dark root gives the illusion that it's dirty. A blonde dry shampoo will improve the situation, but throwing your hair into a messy bun on the way to work isn't an option. 

And dying it back? 

Dream on. Fake blonde hair is super porous, so even a permanent dye will disappear before very long, leaving you with an attractive dishwater colour, or needing to get it re-dyed so often that you might as well have stuck with the blonde. 

There is literally no better feeling in the world than fresh highlights 

They might leave you poor, ruin your hair and take up days of your life. But you just can't beat that freshly dyed feeling. 

http://giphy.com/gifs/yT3Ivg7z0BCda