Does anyone have a recipes for permanent bright green and blue hair dyes. Nobody's making one that doesn't wash out in less than a week. If you can come up with anything you'll make a lot of frustrated people very happy.

i dont know of any permanent kinds, but theres a brand of hair dye called raw colour that seems to last a lot longer than any other hair dye ive had experiance with. the only place i know of that they sell it is hottopic.

-meg

there's a place around here called the studio, that can do permanet bright bright colours.. I would sure like to know how they pull it off. gar.

gamine*

manic panic has crazy colors. not permanent, but lasts (for me at least) a month or two.

roobarb, if you want your blue or green to be true and lasting, you need to prebleach your hair to the pale yellow stage. Once you've got that accomplished use Special Effects which you can get wherever you can get it. Mall-type beauty stores like Pure Beauty, but not Sally's. Online I recommend goodgoth.com for both the price and the service .
When you color your hair, put a shower cap on over your head, and use a hairdryer to warm up your hair, and keep the warm air blowing on it until the point where you can't stand it anymore. Then wrap a towel around the shower cap to hold the heat in. As many hours as you can keep it on your head the better, it won't hurt you to keep it on all day, just don't let it dry out.

Some people wrap their pillow in an old towel and sleep in it overnight, (with shower cap) but I'm not sure that's necessary, and it could be a big mess if you move around in your sleep.

Then for aftercare, don't wash your hair very often. Maybe once a week or less. And when you do wash your hair, put a wee bit of the Special Effects in your conditioner, just a bit to replace what went down the drain.

Special Effects is much more intense and lasting than Fudge, Directions or Manic Panic. Anyway, good luck with whatever you end up doing.

Hey, now, let's not say anything negative about Manic Panic. Two crafty gals started that fine company, Tish and Snooky. I used to match my hair to my go-go boots to my nails using Manic Panic products. And as Tish and Snooky explained to me back then, the only way to have your radiant new color be permanent is to make your hair porous (translation: bleach, bleach, bleach). Have fun!

I'm not dissing your friends. I contend that there are better products out there now. Kudos to them for being pioneers.

just on the manic panic tip, i refuse to waste my money on that..i fully understand that they were the "firsts" and back in the day, it WAS a fine product...but my hair is insanely damaged/porous, and the majority of the manic panic washed out in under a week, and left my hair a terrible faded color. i full agree with selina on the special effects, its the only "color" brand i've had luck with..i use punky professionals in red on my ends, but that fades pretty fast too.

in regards to blue and green dyes, in my past experience with friends, you gotta keep up on the maintenance, or dye it dark....because both colors look GROSS when they start to fade :P

-eryn

i'm not sure this is a good idea at all, but when i dyed my hair with kool-aid (without bleaching it first) it never came out, although i'd been told it'd fade in 6 weeks. i used purply-red though, i'm not sure how green/blue would work, and i'm sure it wouldn't really show unless you bleached your hair.
but anyway, you just mix the powder with boiling water and stick your hair in it - once it's cooled a little, of course. i did it as hot as i could stand it, maybe that's why it never faded. it looks kind of odd - really flat, but i guess any dye in a non-traditional-for-hair color will. good luck!

As far as I know, there are no permanent punky colored hair dyes, you may be able to make some by mixing dyes with cartoony "Real" colors like Feria (I wouldn't mix permanent and semi-permanent though, they work in two different ways) but that'll be pretty hit and miss. For semi-permanents, check out dyemyhair.com which has lots of tips and pics. I don't know why the semi's are only sticking to your hair for two weeks though, it lasts in my hair forever! Maybe you're not bleaching enough or you're not leaving it on your hair long enough?

Hey, what a coincidence, I am putting blue streaks in my hair right now using Selina-k's recommended method, which I started doing earlier today, before I'd read her post. I have Special Effects dye in "Blue Velvet" on my hair right now, under a showercap. I put it in my hair at like, 4:00 this afternoon, and I am planning on leaving it in overnight. I already have blond hair, so I didn't need to bleach it, but if you have darker hair, that's the way you'll have to go. I'll let you know how it turns out...maybe I can even take some pictures, if anyone is interested. Good luck, and have fun!
Rachel

regarding manic panic- i've found that the pinks and purples work **really* well. i dyed my hair every 3 months or so for seven years (from black to pink to blonde) and ended up going back to manic panic. always. by bleaching the fuck out of my hair, putting the color in, wrapping it up in a towel over night, and then washing it out. presto. you are a goddess. just don't forget to wear gloves, put vaseline on your ears or else you'll look like a martian.

nailpolish remover, lava soap or homemade (sugar and honey) can help get the stain out. and if there is **ANY** chance your hair will get wet, make sure the color won't drip out. it's a bad scene. and, also, makes you look like a martian.

the blue, however, doesn't tend to work because it has a tendency to turn green and then *ick* gray.

plus, it's vegetable dye. all of that special fx stuff seems like it would wreak havoc on your hair!

whatever you do, have fun with it!
-betsy

ironically enough, pink manic panic is what totalli sucked for me.

anyways, special fx IS vegetable dye...and raw is not only a vegetable dye, it's vegan approved.

-eryn

Actually, even if you have blond hair you should bleach it first to make it nice and porous to absorb the dye. I had a friend that was practically an albino and left the dye in his hair overnight and it still didn't take because he didn't open up the hair shaft with bleach first. I did my hair the same color the same night and it only took 45 mins to turn out great. So even if you're blond, if you want good results, bleach your hair at least a litle bit with a gentle bleach first!

For the record, I find special effects bleeds too much to be good for streaks, it's intensity makes it more of an allover color good dye. I use fudge for streaks because it doesn't blend so much with the other colors you're using.

I have never bleached my hair, and I've done streaks three or four times with different kinds of dyes and had good results every time. In fact, the first set of purple and blue streaks I did four years ago took months to completely wash out, especially the purple, which faded to pink and looked neat. I can't remember what types of dyes they were. I think the reasons I can get away without bleaching my hair are that my hair is bleached/damaged naturally by the sun every summer, and it's curly, and thus extra porous. My blue streaks turned out well this time, except that I don't think I put enough dye on the very ends of some of my hair, and they're a faded gray rather than a deep blue like the rest. I may do a little touch-up, but I'm generally quite happy with the results. I just hope it lasts awhile.

hey, pinks and reds basically work longer anyway...and it's much easier to work with all stages of the color: the intense first days, the mellowed weeks after, the slow fade into orange...sigh, memories. (If I seem biased, lemme just put it this way: my mom's mexican, my dad's white, therefore, my skin doesn't take to cool shades kindly, and the amount of bleaching my hair requires to even become dyeable tends to still lend it an orange cast).

but permanent blue or green dye? yes, virginia, it does exist. my reasoning? stylists sometimes mix dyes to create pleasing shades like a painter would blend oils on a palette. If this method yields burnt umber, why not aquamarine? Usually in a particularly subversive area in your town, you are sure to find a salon where someone could apply this to your head (the kind of salon that would also dole out multicolored hair extensions and trendy razor-cuts). For a more diy-approach, I think (think being the operative word) that you can actually purchase big packages of mixable hairdye pigments in primary colors at Sally's...but I could be wrong, wrong, wrong. Was that a dream? Do they exist? I suggest you haul bum to Sally's (or a similar locale)and find out for yourself.

i just walked by mastercuts today and there was an ad for colored dyes... the girl's hair was streaked blue and green. maybe you should check it out.

eryn- a big ooops! on the special fx thing. thanks for setting me straight! :)
and vegan approved, too? right on!
but their boxes just look *so* cheesy!

whatever you do, dont use manic panic it changes wierd colors and can make your hair fall out, go to sally beauty supply, or the local beauty school, they have stuff like that.

there's boxes?? :/ we might be thinking of two different things then. :/ i always bought my sfx in bottles, that's also how raw comes.

*holding vegetable based statement hostage until the mix up gets sorted out*

;)

-eryn

I'll cosign eryn on this one. It's vegetable based, as is MP, as is PC, as is La Riche Directions. They all work by staining the hair, instead of opening the cuticle and forcing in color molecules as permanent color (with peroxide developer) does. They're all gentle, and because they coat the hair, they make damaged hair feel a bit smoother, and a lot more "conditioned."

Where they differ are in the quality of pigments, and in viscosity. As has been noted in this thread, Special Effects is not as thick in consistency as the products that come in jars like MP. Good news is you don't need as much product, bad news, as has been noted, it's harder to create streaks and tips without the use of foils.

As far as SFX being vegan, I have no idea, never saw it come in a box, and have never seen anyone's hair break off from using Manic Panic. Bad bleachings, yes! Manic Panic, no.

"Special Effects" comes in a bottle and you can get it at alternative shops like Hot Topic. It is made by Hair Color USA. I don't know anything about whether it is vegan or anything like that. The bottle says that it is semi-permanent. This is what I used on my hair, and it turned out great, though like people said, it does have a tendency to bleed when it's used for streaks. Luckily I like this effect.

"Special FX," on the other hand, is different stuff. I saw an advertisement for it in the pile of magazines I was looking through last night...it was either Spin or Jane. I've never seen it in stores, though. I believe it's made by Clairol or some big company like that, and it does, indeed, come in a box. The ad had a picture of an Asian girl with blue streaks in her hair, but I don't think it said how permanent the dye is.

Hope this helps to clear up some of the confusion!

yep. i was thinking of special fx. (and the damn cheesy box)

thanks for the clarification! :)

about 5 months ago i got my hair dyed orange in a salon (present from a friend) and they used this stuff called 'stain setter' which they mixed with my very own special fx hair dye. it was greenish and thin and my orange is NOT washing out. i wash my hair every day and i've never been able to keep a dye in my hair for more than a month. So while i don't know what that stuff was, or how it works, you might be able to find some online or in a salon supply store.

if you go the kool-aid route, don't use the instant stuff-use the kind that you have to add sugar to. sugar+hair=ick.