Review: Irresistible Me Hair Extensions + How I Retouch my Lavender Hair

The materials are pretty standard and fairly affordable: a hair coloring kit (mixing bowl, regular and long tail dye brushes, and sturdy hair clips), a hair cap & gloves (not pictured above), a huge bottle of conditioner (mine has 39 fl. oz.), and hair dye(s) of your choice (I got Violet and Silver from Pravana Chromasilk Vivids). 

I've retouched my hair by myself for at least 3 times now, so I have a pretty solid idea of the amount of dyes that I need in order to achieve the color that works for me. This part is essentially a trial-and-error process that takes a few sessions to master, so it highly depends on the lightness level of your hair and the the kind of color you want to achieve, but if your situation is anything close to mine, here's the mixture I came up with that might be a good baseline:

From the 39 oz. bottle of conditioner, I actually only used 1/4 of it (pretty much until it reached the rim of the mixing bowl as you can see on the first photo above), so this huge container could last for up to 4 coloring sessions if your hair is as long as mine. In the photos above, I progressively added the silver dye at about a consistent amount until the pigment actually showed up. The silver itself doesn't do much, but I find that it's quite a significant factor in the fading process. When I use the violet dye alone, my hair ends up with a pink undertone and thus fades to a pastel pink and eventually blonde, whereas when I add a good amount of silver to the violet, it has a much cooler undertone and my lavender hair ends up fading to a silvery gray and eventually a silvery ash blonde. Again, it's all up to personal preference: if you want silvery or pink hair at some point, then add some silver or simply use violet alone, respectively.

Here, I literally added a drop of the violet dye, and as you can see, it turned completely purple, which goes to show how incredibly pigmented this one is compared to Silver. With that said, be super careful with Violet in particular because it's extremely concentrated, so always add drop-by-drop. Otherwise, you'd have to add more conditioner than necessary. 

Now that the tricky part is over, simply apply this mixture to your hair with whatever application method works for you. Personally, I prefer just applying it with my hands (with gloves) because I get too impatient with the brush especially since I have super long hair and I don't have anyone to do it for me. I usually divide my hair into four sections - two in the bottom half and two in the upper half. With the extensions, I don't really need to section them since they're already in small, separate pieces.

Keep in mind that I only wash my hair once or twice a week to make the color last as long as possible, thus the fading often varies. Generally, the lavender typically lasts two weeks tops for me; after the 2nd wash, the violet's pretty much stripped off and it starts turning into mauve, then silver, and ultimately blonde. However, I do like keeping the silver and ash blonde hair for a while, so at this rate, I'd most likely have to retouch the lavender every month as opposed to every two weeks. No worries though - the Pravana dyes probably won't run out for years because they're so pigmented! For everything else that you need to know about my pastel hair experience, head over to this post.

I hope this review + my hair coloring tips helped! Once again, thanks so much to Irresistible Me for sending me these amazing hair extensions that I will probably wear all day every day. Look out for a follow-up post on this product in which I show before & after photos with the extensions on!

'Til my next one!

xoxo,