DIY Hair Maintenance: It Sort of Worked

For some reason this month is really busy for me and I have very little free time. I’ve also decided to try to save money. (Boots will be hitting the stores soon, after all.) As a time-saving and cost-cutting measure I decided to try a little DIY hair maintenance in an attempt to prolong my next visit to Misty, my beloved hairstylist. I have a bob and highlights that require touch-ups every six to seven weeks.

This was a rather spontaneous decision after ducking into a Sephora to escape the brutal heat in NYC. It’s impossible for me to leave that store without a new potion. I justified my new purchases by noting that if I could extend my salon visits from every six weeks to every 8 weeks, it would save me two trips per year. Or about the price of a new pair of boots!

I picked up an Oscar Blandi Root Touch-up & Highlighting Pen ($23) in light golden blonde. It comes in a mascara shaped tube and the color is dispensed onto a tiny brush which you paint onto your roots.

Then I saw something called HerCut, which is a line of products developed to work with your cut, rather than your hair type. It comes in a bob, shag, long layer, pixie, and blunt cut version. A problem, perhaps, if you have an Alice Dellal penchant for multiple cuts at once.

Skeptical and intrigued at the same time, I bought The Bob Catalyst ($28), which purportedly enhances “forward flowing angular movement and clean lines. Keeps the geometric shape that hits all the right angles.” It contains something called “Tumbling Polymers.” A note of warning to organic types: there is not a single ingredient in this product that is less than 10 letters or is recognizable as something that appears in nature.

I opened the Oscar Blandi pen and the product was really goopy. The color looked khaki greenish, rather than golden blonde. Lovely as a shearling jacket on the A/W 2010 runways, not so great on my hair. However, I painted it on and hoped for the best.

It looked like some preschoolers got hold of my head and started finger painting. I let it dry, then decided to see if rinsing would do anything. It washed some of the green away, but actually deposited a bit of blonde color on my roots that blended pretty nicely. The problem is that I get a lot of highlights in a few different shades. There’s no way I could cover my whole head with this product.

I had better luck with the HerCut. It comes in a bottle made of two distinct chambers which contain a gel and a cream. You’re told to prime the bottle and squirt until both are dispensed equally (there are two holes in the bottle). I had to squirt about a quarter of the gel out before the cream came. Annoying, but I finally got the correct proportion, applied it to my towel-dried hair, then blow dried with a round brush like I always do.

The first thing I noticed is that it took a lot less time to dry my hair. The next thing I noticed is that I didn’t have any flyaways at all, which is the bane of any bob-wearing woman. The third thing is that I didn’t need to use my flat iron on the ends. There were no annoying flippy pieces.

So my DIY experiment was mildly successful. But Misty is still on my speed dial.