Japanese Hair Dye

Hello hypothetical readers!

After some time (1 day shy of a month lol) without updating here is undoubtedly the best review you will ever read.

In November I was lucky enough to be accosted by some people from Rocareta Hair in Marutamachi who gave me a free cut, wash and dye job in exchange for letting them take some pictures of the results. This was very exciting as it would have cost over 10,000 yen at full price, and being broke I usually just go to Biyou Plage in Kita-oji, which charges 1,620 yen for a bog standard dry cut. You definitely do not get a free cup of tea and a biscuit. It ended up going a bit black, meaning the communal washing up liquid supply decreased quite alarmingly as I spent several hours in the shower trying to make myself look less like Morticia Addams, and ended up smelling like a plate. However by mid-January I was starting to get some rather horrible pale brown roots and the colour had faded to a sort of reddish chestnut brown. I decided I wanted it dark again and with bated breath took down the box of Palty dye which had been languishing on my shelf for months.

I have dyed my hair with Japanese hair dye before, choosing to ignore all the reviews that said "IT WON'T WORK ON CAUCASIAN HAIR!!!1!" and got mixed results. The first time I used Liese Prettia dye mainly because it was cheap and they had a nice choice of colours. However, since I was dyeing over bleached ends with a dark brown colour that didn't have much red in it, it went an absolutely awful, ashy shade of grayish-green. After enlisting the help of my serial dye-er sister I had to go over it with an orangey colour, which fixed the problem but wasn't really what I wanted and actually bleached my hair a bit. 

Anyway, onto the review - here is a picture of the box with my lovely 1990s throwback modem in the background. As with most Japanese beauty products the packaging is very pretty and girly. All the colours of this brand have cute food-themed names - this one is Bonbon Chocolat. I was dithering between this colour and the one a shade lighter, which was called Mocha something, but continuing my tradition of ignoring beauty advice picked the darker one. The dye is quite reasonably priced and can be found at bigger pharmacies. I think it cost around 800 yen which is quite a bit cheaper than most UK ones. If you're lucky enough to live in a city that's got a Don Quixote that isn't out in the sticks you can probably find it there for about 650 yen.

Here are the contents of the box, from left to right: post-dye hair treatment, stirring spoon, colour cream, colour water, gloves, and the red thing at the top is the mixing cup. This was a foam dye which I hadn't really used before except the other time I used a Japanese dye. Instead of putting the colour mixture into a bottle and shaking it up you have to squeeze the cream into the cup and then add the water, and stir it all up with the spoon until it's expanded enough to reach the line inside the cup. Since the instructions have pictures on them they're quite easy to follow but it probably helps if you know a bit of Japanese in case you're not sure.

I found the dye hard to apply as it's quite splashy so blobs of it kept going on the bathroom floor, which is now slightly stained in places (please please nobody tell the caretaker that was me). I also felt it didn't rub in quite as well as non-foam dye and I had to keep going over the same bit of hair. The gloves were really good though. They fitted quite tightly as opposed to those weird ones you get in UK dyes that are sort of the same material as bread bags in the bakery at Tesco, and are baggy so they keep falling off.
There I was gleefully smothering foamy gunge all over my head when things took a horrifying turn - it became apparent quite quickly that the amount of dye might not cover all my hair. I have very thick hair that's just shy of boob length and have always used 2 boxes of dye at home, but when I used the Prettia dye I bought 2 boxes and one was more than enough. I compared the volumes on the box when shopping and the Palty dye had slightly more, so I figured it would be fine. How wrong I was.
I had sectioned my hair into 2 halves and was able to cover the bottom section and the left side of the top section, not including my fringe. This made for a very odd two-tone look and none of my friends being available to rescue me I had to put my massive beret on, shove it in a bun and cycle soggy-headed into town for another box. Annoyingly, this time I couldn't manage to use all the dye up, but I think I should probably have used it to go over the bits I'd already done as in certain lights you can still see the roots a bit. I left the dye on for about 25 minutes as I didn't want it to go black again and have to spend 3 hours every night rubbing washing up liquid into my scalp to lighten it.

After dyeing the bits that I hadn't been able to do during round 1 I washed the dye out and put a deep conditioner on it. I hadn't used the treatment yet as there seemed no point when I'd be dyeing it again, so my hair felt very dry and tangly but was fine after the deep conditioner.

Here is the final result:

Sorry for the lack of a "before" pic! I don't really take a lot of selfies since my front camera doesn't work and the back one isn't fantastic as my phone is so old. The bit on my right side isn't really a different colour to the rest - that was just the lighting. All in all I was very happy with the colour. It went a nice dark brown without going black as has often happened to me in the past. My fringe did look a bit darker than the rest at first but it's had a couple of washes and is a pretty uniform colour all over now.

And now the last point of the review: the included hair treatment. As I had a deep conditioner left over from Christmas I didn't use it until the next time I'd washed my hair. It includes camellia oil which is apparently very popular as a hair treatment with Japanese ladies (you can find it in almost every pharmacy in a yellow box with a red flower on). This was a leave-in treatment, which I was admittedly very sceptical about. I'd never used this sort of product before and was worried it'd make my hair greasy. However I couldn't have been more wrong! It does take a few hours to soak in properly but it smells nice and makes your hair so soft and lovely. I managed to get 3 applications out of one sachet as well. Probably the best post-dye conditioner I've ever used.

Final verdict:

Price: 4/5

Packaging: 3.5/5

Ease of use: 3.5/5
Results: 5/5

Would buy again!! Definitely consider buying 2 boxes if you have thick or longer than shoulder-length hair though.

The Brown Brown Grass of Home

Sadly I haven't been able to locate any ruby slippers, but I am very lucky to have a cousin who works at British Airways and can get me cheap flights. Unfortunately Christmas here doesn't mean an excuse to not do any work for 2 weeks like it does at home, but Doshisha was kind enough to allow us 1 week off the grind to welcome in the new year. Being a lazy slob, I of course decided to take full advantage of this and spend 2 weeks back in the UK.

Living 6000 miles away from home for the last 4 months has not been easy, especially without my Japan buddy/best friend by my side like usual. I've missed the big things, like my family, and the silly small things like lemon curd. It took almost a full day of travelling to get there, but as the plane passed over the flat landscape and rows upon rows of ugly houses, I felt a surge of affection for my Marmite-scented, tea-sodden country of origin.

Of course living in Japan isn't all doom and gloom so I wanted to write this post to remind me of the good and bad bits I've encountered so far on my study abroad adventure.

THE GOOD

• It is almost impossible to get bad food in Japan. Cheap chain restaurants, Mos Burger, microwaveable junk you can find in the konbini - however far down the price ladder you go, it will probably still be head and shoulders above some of the hall food available in Cambridge. I won't name and shame any colleges but let's just say I've had some vegetables in hall that tasted like they'd been ethically sourced from the bottom of a bin.
• Public transport is reliable and much less expensive than the UK. The rent for my dorm room is also pretty reasonable.
• 24-hour convenience stores are excellent for those of us who like to stay up well past midnight doing nothing in particular and then have a shameful 3am crisps binge. Shops in general also tend to stay open later.
• Many fun things to do that you can't find in the UK such as karaoke, purikura, cat cafes.
• This is a bit of a subjective good point but there are SO MANY adorable fashions. I almost cried last time I visited Shibuya 109.
• People are nice, helpful and grateful if you speak Japanese. Also it's sometimes quite nice when strangers want to come and chat or take a picture with you. A bit like being a celebrity.

THE BAD

• Not eating meat for any reason makes you a weirdo. Despite everyone's obsession with weight loss there is a lack of vegetarian/vegan options and substitutes for animal products are difficult to find. Gelatin and chicken extract in fucking everything.
• The staring. As a bog-standard white girl with fairly ordinary dress sense, generally no one in the UK gives me a second glance, but in Japan it's difficult to forget you're an anomaly. Children and young salarymen on the train are particularly bad offenders. 
• The sense of being an outsider is difficult to deal with at times. Would be much less difficult if people on the street didn't think it was so funny to shout random English phrases at anyone who doesn't look Japanese.
• Weird hatred of card payments. Even the huge international franchise that is McDonald's does not take cards. Why is this??? Given my track record with losing important items I really don't like carrying large amounts of cash around when I have to pay my rent. Also, only 7-Eleven and Japan Post ATMs allow foreign cards to withdraw money.
  

THE UGLY

• Perverts. Here is a list of my experiences so far:
  1. Weird guy whacking off/touching my butt in the queue at Disneyland.
  2. Weird guy pulling my dress up and taking a photo at a spa.
  3. Weird guys assuming if you're foreign that means you're "easy" and creeping all over you.
• Some people have kind of outdated attitudes to women's and LGBT issues. This could probably be a whole post on its own but let's just say I'd taken how liberal the UK is for granted until I came to Japan. Having spent a lot of time in Brighton, a city known for its progressiveness, I couldn't quite believe it when a guy I was chatting to over Line said "I don't have any gay or lesbian friends so I thought it was just in movies". And as a feminazi it gets on my nerve a bit if I go out with a guy and he keeps pulling me out of the way of oncoming pedestrians by my arm. Japanese guys: would you do this to your male friends? I highly doubt it. Please do not do it to me. I am not a blind person and am perfectly capable of moving out of the way without your input.