Yesterday Adam arrived to a meeting with Charlotte and I sporting a post Glastonbury glow and a rather fetching hat. Despite the tan we couldn’t help but notice his hair was a somewhat different ‘warmer’ shade to normal. You see Adam had headed back to his youth and rediscovered the fabled Sun-In.
I bloody loved Sun-In as a teenager. The spray in highlighter used to take my mousey locks to a brassy blonde for a good week or two. It was super cheap and a bottle seemed to last for ages. However as I’m sure everyone remembered it was only a matter of time before the shade seemed to take on a mind of it’s own and let’s say went slightly more strawberry blonde than platinum. In fact anyone reading this who went to secondary school with me will remember my then boyfriend and I had unintentional matching ginger hair colours for a while thanks to my reliance on Clairol permanent hair colour and his misuse of a Sun-in bottle.
Let’s all be clear here, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with ginger hair, Juliane Moore has the most luscious barnet I ever did see, however Sun-In left me looking more pumpkin than Christina Hendricks.
I didn’t realise you could actually still buy Sun-In but if you fancy a walk down memory lane then you can bag yourself a bottle from Amazon.
Adam is keen to reverse his new ginger tone. Charlotte has suggested a good dousing of purple shampoo; One intense treatment on dry hair for five minutes followed by a regular shampoo after. I was going to suggest the tomato ketchup trick and then remembered that’s reserved for when hair takes a greenish tinge.
So the purpose of the post is two fold; to gather any tips you may have on eliminating Adam’s Sun-In misdemeanour and also to reminisce about the hair products of our youth. Who remembers Wella shaders and toners?! Maybe you favoured a hair mascara or a spray in colour? What did you used to use to transform your barnet rather than take a trip to the hairdressers?
HAIR MASCARA!
**weeps with laughter**
Oh my gosh. My favourite was a blue glittery number! x
Rebecca, I know right? What was it all about?!
I bloody loved Sun In! I used it every summer and would often be found using the hairdryer method to accelerate it. I luckily only ever went blonde, or so I thought!! I also used lemon juice but unfortunately used my mums bottle of Jif Lemon rather than the real stuff. I don’t think it had the desired effect. I had a terrible experience with those bloody toners and my whole hair went orange before my school exchange to Germany. I remember my friends frantically trying to wash it out in every service station toilet we stopped at and drying my hair with the hand dryers. It didn’t work and I wore a hat the whole week!! x
Lottie I think I used Jif Lemon once too!!!
Did you look as good as me??
🙂
I was desperate to be wellas shaders ‘mahogany’ but my hair is dark brown verging on black so don’t know what I was expecting to happen?!
I also once tried to bleach the ends to dye them bright red like the girl from rebuplica, ended up having to have most of my hair cut off.
I used to think she was so cool Claire! Oh no though. Did your hair break with the bleach?
It sort of didn’t just get on the ends and as my hair is so dark it didn’t really bleach that much so I ended up with orange bits all over and my hair basically looked like I’d shaved a tiger to make a wig. My finest hair hour. Or week.
I didn’t learn and years later did the same to my fringe to achieve a neon pink slice through it, which worked but only lasted 3 days before the pink washed out and then I had a orange striped fringe for about 6 weeks because I couldn’t be bothered to keep dying it.
Safe to say I haven’t been near bleach again.
I used to love the hair sprays from Superdrug that turned your hair copper or glittery 😂
I’d like to see you sport this on Friday please 😉 x
I am the world’s most boring hair person, only ever really having bleach highlights every 5/6 months or so. I’m lucky to have ashy undertones rather than warm but I did have an absolute disaster when I was 17 and essentially fried my hair for a fortnight in Florida. I came back and it was like straw – yellow straw at that. My hairdresser said the only thing she could do was chop it off so I sported a shoulder length “layered” bob for a while that I absolutely hated.
Yet now…..I’m looking at all of these types of shorter do’s on Pinterest and thinking I should give it a whirl! x
I think I spent most of my teens with straw hair. I also remember purposely dying my hair red and then going to Majorca and having to use Vosene to strip the colour as it went an absolutely hideous shade in the sun!
I loved sun-in while I was in school, when we all joined Facebook (about 10 years ago) everyone posted the old school pics on there, I couldn’t believe how ginger I was!!! I honestly thought, for years, I was sporting amazing blonde hair!!!
I remember using a Wella colour mousse in post box red to look like Ginger Spice, but I also had a badly looked after perm! The bathroom ended up looking like a cheap budget slasher film and everyone laughs out loud when they see the photo of me.
Now my go to product to lighten the lengths and blend my roots is http://www.boots.com/john-frieda-sheer-blonde-go-blonder-express-in-shower-lightening-treatment-34ml-10209978, it works just enough to save me going to the hair dressers every 6 weeks and without the risk of turning ginger. John Frieda also do a sun-in alternative, not that I’ve tried it.
Also, absolutely agree with the purple shampoo to get rid of the brassy tones, just use a good conditioning treatment too as the shampoo really drys your hair out.
Oh those flipping colour mousses! I think my dad had to paint our bathroom every month when me and my sister lived at home!
Very good tip on the John Freida x
Oh my goodness shaders and toners. I swear those never worked.
My worst dye disaster was pink highlights on my ‘pob’ (remember them?!). The pink faded in a couple of days so then I had dodgy bleach streaks, which I then decided to rectify with sun-in 🤦♀️. I had orange hair for ages. Thankfully I discovered a. hairdressers and b. purple shampoo and swore to never be orange or brassy again!
On a different note – is Lolly away?
Oh the Pob Becs, Posh spice has an awful lot to answer for!
The lovely Lolly La Pop has actually left Rock My Towers for an exciting new adventure x
Is it just me that feels a bit disheartened that Lolly has left but there has been no real announcement or a post alluding to it?!
We were all really sad when Lolly told us she was leaving too, but we wish her all the best with her next endeavour.
Oh! Will there be a goodbye post at all? Just that she has been part of the community for so long, would be nice for us all to wish her well?
It is a shame there wasn’t a goodbye post. Will we get to see Lolly’s finished house on RMS?
I’d love to feature Lolly’s finished house. Fingers crossed we can nip over when it’s all completed x
When I was a student (many years ago), I used to buy a pink hair dye called Crazy Colour, that you could only get from wholesalers. If I got caught in the rain, I’d have pink dye running down my face!!
Just had to google this. It looks epic!
Didn’t know it was still around! I loved it!
I thought I was going to look like sunshine incarnate as I swanned around the Glastonbury Festival… After liberally applying the famous Sun-In it literally took less than two hours of waiting at the entrance gate in the 34 degree heat for me to get well an truly follicly tango’d.
I believe there is evidence of this over on RMS Instagram stories today
To be honest, you have to do a bit more than walk around Glastonbury with Orange hair to stand out but now back in the real world I could do with toning it down a shade or two… The purple shampoo suggestion from Charlotte hasn’t helped matters, so I’m off to the shops now for some Just For Men… Wish me luck!
Also… just realised my profile picture makes a totally mockery of all this… I do actually have longer hair now 😉
You should change your avatar to your new look Adam 😉
done…
My Brother in his youth once used sun-in, but not on his head hair (which was already blonde) but on his more ‘personal’ areas! Apparently it was to impress his then girlfriend. Too funny for words!
O.M.G!!!!!!
Sun-in, hair mascara haha.
I just have horrible flashbacks to using that Charlie perfume you bought in Boots! I wonder if you can still get it – I mean it didn’t even smell very nice!
I used to be quite religious at using Boots own brand coconut leave in conditioner.. help combat that sun-in look!
On another note – I don’t know if it’s just me but the Rock my Style header isn’t showing for me (I use Chrome) – it’s just titles on the left-hand side and no image. I saw someone (Charlotte?) mention a new look. I canny see it 🙁
Oh no Lynn 🙁 Have you tried clearing your cache?
I had the same problem Lauren but can see the lovely new header after following your advice.
Thanks!
As for Sun-in, my cousin covered my hair with the strongest one (think it comes/came in 3 varieties?) when I was 15. As I have dark brown/chestnut hair with reddish tendencies I came back to school after the summer holidays with ginger-cat coloured locks and had to pretend to the ‘mean girls’ in my class that it had gone that shade on its own whilst on holiday in France. Not sure if they bought it…
So glad you can all see it now 🙂
I never realised there were three varieties!
Sorted now 🙂
My worst hair colour disaster was using a very dark brunette colour that actually turned black! I looked like a goth…and the worst bit was I was meeting my boyfriend of the time’s parents for the first time that day. I must have washed my hair twenty times before I realised it wasn’t coming out. My hairdresser couldn’t do any kind of quick treatment so I went between three different sunbed places to get as much colour into myself as possible and bought a darker foundation. In the end I also looked as if I had been tangoed.
Claire, this made me laugh out loud!
This is less of a hair story, more of an eyebrow one. My hair is a dark brunette, which goes a lovely more golden brown in the sun. To keep this up all year, I dye it in the winter. Something none of my friends were really aware of. This is fine, but my eyebrows are a slightly different shade; something I was not conscious of until my sister kindly pointed it out, in boots and directed me to an eyebrow shadow kit.
This was all fine until, the other weekend, in a fit of pimms/ heat induced madness I jumped in my friends duck pond/lake at a BBQ and upon leaving the pond, my kind friends brother pointed out that my eyebrows were running down my face and exclaimed that he didn’t realise i dyed my hair! I then had to explain! Turns out hair mistakes carry on into your 20’s too!
Thanks for the tip for the header. I was having trouble seeing it too! It is gorgeous.
Bloody Pimms – it gets us in to all sorts of trouble Amelia!
How fancy that your friend has a pond/lake though!