Apparently still growing

I was really looking forward to see my length shots. I honestly had no idea just how long my hair is getting and in what state my ends are in.

Once you reach a certain length it becomes impossible to get a real look at your ends yourself. You turn into an eager dog hunting for your tail when you do that.

So I was pretty surprised to see that my ends are still fairly thick, if they haven’t even thickened up!

I really had assumed I would be approaching terminal length by now.

Once you approach terminal length, your ends will thin out a lot.

Before hair sheds to repeat the growth cycle, they enter a resting phase where they don’t grow. This means a true terminal length has extreme taper since not all hairs grow to the same maximum length anyways.

People who are at real, true terminal length usually have just a few hairs that are super long, so if your ends resemble a blunt cut just remotely, you are not near terminal.

Pretty surprising, but I guess I still have a bit of growth left in my scalp. Question is how much longer I will like it. 

Windy video

11 years hairniversary

Hubby thought it was a good idea to take the pictures outside so we had to rush a bit to catch the little bit of daylight we got.  

As you can see, it was pretty windy!

Then we got too cold and went indoors. But by then, the light had gotten pretty bad, so this is the best we could do.

Happy anniversary to me! 

Today’s hair

Bit of improvisation here… The glittery “scrunchies” are way too small to go over the bun, but I hooked them through each other and looped them over the ends of the Flexi 8. They even covered the Flexi 8 perfectly. I likey.

  

Today’s hair

I look like a completely different person with my hair “down” like this. 

Today’s hair

Not as nice as the little Santa scrunchie from some days ago. Funny to think about that I used to be able to wear this around a single bun!

Merry Christmas!

Today’s hair

Camera was being a bit uncooperative, but I think you can still see what’s going on.

Cassia

It’s been a while since I did a real, thorough deep conditioning of my hair. It would appreciate some cassia!

I have wanted to try adding oil to my cassia mix to see if it helps bind the cassia molecules and oils. And experiment with this cherry tea that hubby and I didn’t like. It develops the richest, deepest red colour I’ve ever seen in a tea. You know you’re a longhaired weirdo when you find yourself wondering “Can I use that in my hair?”

My intended products, left to right:

• The cherry tea. Look how dark red it is!
• Argan oil
• Schwarzkopf Gliss Ultimate repair (3x liquid keratin) for the cassia treatment
• VO5 to add some volume to the cassia mix and volume for the following moisture treatment
• Schwarzkopf Gliss Total repair (19 ingredient complex) for the following moisture treatment
• And in the front my cassia (“neutral henna”) whose box I took apart to get a more accurate weight on it.

Schwarzkopf Gliss Ultimate repair (3x liquid keratin) is one of my favourite conditioners because it really feels like it *does* something in my hair, but it leaves it slightly cranky after a treatment. Of course this is not necessarily a bad thing, since deep treatments will mess with the hairs structure and the little “scales” when ingredients are deposited in the core. But of course this means I want a quick glossing over afterwards to make my hair happy and manageable immediately after. 

Mixing up a test batch:

• 20 ml Schwarzkopf Gliss Ultimate repair
• 5 ml argan oil
• 10-15 gram cassia (My electronic scale only weighs to 5 grams)
• 5 ml VO5
• 5 ml cherry tea

To my surprise, the mix turned out to be pretty dry.

Very strange indeed, because usually I just mix cassia and conditioner with no extra moisture. I guess it is more cassia heavy than usual? I actually had to add more moisture than I had planned.

Scooped the mixture up in a bag and rubbed it into a ball of test-hair.

Tied a knot and left it against a heater. I completely forgot about it and left it for 3 hours.

Results looked like this: Test ball up top and a control at the bottom.

I’m surprised at how little colour difference there is. The extremely red tea didn’t do anything for the colour at all. I guess the pH of the tea influences the colour development?

It was nice and shiny though (Which the picture didn’t capture well) so I guess its not a bad idea to add oils to cassia.

I went ahead with a full sized batch of this.

Cassia mix:

• 180 ml Schwarzkopf Gliss Ultimate repair (Rest of the bottle)
• 50 ml argan oil
• 100 gram cassia (My electronic scale only weighs to 5 grams)
• 50 ml VO5
• 50 ml cherry tea

Unfortunately it was too cassia heavy and very difficult to smear out. I guess a near-full pack of cassia is too much for a single treatment unless I want to double the amount of conditioner. Of course that would feel like a bit of waste since I don’t really need more than a normal sized bottle plus a bit.

Even though the mix was so heavy, it started dripping horribly after an hour. I guess it’s the addition of tea that did it? My simple conditioner+cassia only mix doesn’t have those issues!

Next time I will try with a bit of oil but no tea.

After two hours of stuffing toilet paper up under the Sexy Smurf to keep the irritating dripping at bay, I gave up and rinsed it out.

Then followed with two hours of conditioning with the blue V05.

Rinsed, towel-dried, applied leave in conditioner and braided it to let it be cranky in peace.

The results this morning is one of these rare instances where my hair feels really, really soft.

Fangirling

One of my guilty pleasures is to read (about) the Swedish top bloggers. For the most of the time, it’s the equivalent of trash TV: The backstabbing, the constant drunkenness, the whoring themselves out for products or money, the eating disorders, the more or less obvious drug problems, the teenager-clique-esque behaviour where one moment two bloggers are BFFs and the next hate each other. You couldn’t make up how amusing it is!

Of all the Swedish top bloggers, my favourites are Kissie and Foki. Kissie for being so entertaining and Foki for making something out of herself through her blog, creating a business and moving somewhere exotic and interesting. I love reading her blog and envying her life!

My least favourites are Tyra and BlondinBella. Ironically, Tyra also “made something out of herself” through her blogs, but her fashion seems to be shamelessly copied from other brands and her riding is extremely unsympathetical to me with her horses constantly ridden behind the vertical. BlondinBella I just can’t stand: She seems to have made a career out of trying to coach and encourage people to follow their dreams, but hold on a minute here: If she fails with a business, she can run crying to mega-rich old daddy. Does she really think the reason people don’t follow their business-dreams is that they haven’t heard or read her fantastically inspirational inspiration? Does she not realise the rest of us mortals don’t have the option of running crying to daddy and it might hold us back to know we will be paying for a failed business literally for the rest of our lives? Delusional much? Yep, I can’t stand her at all.

Anyways. I had a real fangirl moment today reading Foki’s blog. It’s probably completely random, but she had a picture of my expensive Jaguar scissor in a post about her being at her stylist.

See?