Dyeing My Hair Silver

Last Saturday I was working on campus with my friend Ellen, doing everything in my power to procrastinate revising for my final exam on the Monday. We got onto the topic of hair and as I hadn't had mine cut in a while, I started showing her photos of styles I wanted to try. One of the models happened to have silver/white hair and I, half-jokingly, suggested that we should dye my hair that colour, not expecting much of a reaction.

...To cut a long story short, a couple of hours later I bought some silver dye online and decided that we were going to dye it later that week.

Unfortunately, as a broke student, I couldn't afford to spend a couple of hundred £££ getting it done professionally at a salon. Instead, Ellen volunteered to do it for me and spent several hours researching how to bleach and dye hair at home properly. I was flattered, but I knew that deep down she was just doing it to distract herself from her revision as well. As we decided to do it at home, I thought I'd make a blog post out of it, simply because:
a) If it went well, it would make a good post and
b) If it went horribly wrong, it would make an even better post.

So, without further ado, here is how I dyed my hair silver (...well, silver/white/grey/depends on the light)!


I thought I'd start off by taking some 'before' photos. A week before, I did an overnight coconut oil mask to nourish my hair and stopped washing it two days prior to let the natural oils build up in my scalp. As you can see, my hair hadn't been dyed in ages and was curly, shiny and in perfect condition. Oh, that did not last long...

Products I used:

Bleach London Total Bleach Kit (x2)

Bleach London White Toner

Affinage Infiniti Gothic Grey Series in shade 'Platinum'

Affinage 3% 10 Vol Crème Developer

Bleach London Silver Shampoo

Olaplex No. 3 Hair Perfector

Plastic shower caps, hair clips and applicator brush (Boots)

The first stage was the dreaded bleaching of my hair. Due to the thickness of my hair, we decided to buy two packs of bleach just to be on the safe side and boy, am I glad we did. Ellen sectioned off my hair into four parts and applied the bleach to the main bulk of my hair, avoiding the roots. This was as far as one pack of bleach got us. Using the second pack, Ellen then applied the rest of the bleach to my roots and the sides of my hair as they don't take as long to develop due to the heat from the scalp. I then put on this rather dashing shower cap and let the bleach develop, washing it out after 45 minutes from the initial application.

As to be expected, my hair turned this lovely shade of Slim Shady brassy yellow. It 'tingled' (reads: burned) a tad but in hindsight, it was bearable. No pain, no gain, and all that. Believe me, given how sensitive my skin is, if I'd have had an allergic reaction, we would have certainly known about it. After rinsing out the dye, I applied a hair mask of Olaplex No. 3 and Bleach London Reincarnation Mask, which I left on for a further 20 minutes.

The next step was toning the hair to remove the brassy/yellow colour left by the bleach. This was the most inoffensive step of them all as a little semi-permanent dye was nothing compared to the nuclear bleaching my hair had just endured.

Pictured about is me adorning yet another dapper shower cap with my wonderful friend and all-round saviour, Ellen. (She's going to kill me for including this photo...)

After I washed the toner out of my hair, I followed up with a purple shampoo to try and turn it as white blonde as possible. Once again, I applied yet another hair mask to try and salvage my now absolutely frazzled locks. If you look closely, you can see the sheer terror in my eyes in the second photo as it dawns on me that this was potentially an AWFUL idea and that there really was no turning back now.

And so we come to the final step: the silver/white dye itself. The dye we decided to use was recommended to me by a friend and it really did the job perfectly. Unfortunately, the dye doesn't come with a developer so if you decide to use the same products as me, just bear in mind that they have to be bought separately.

And just like that, I have silver (grey) hair! Even if it has fried my hair within an inch of its life, I'm really happy with the results, especially for a total DIY job.

If you're thinking about going silver as well, I still would recommend saving up and getting it done at a salon, especially one that uses Olaplex. However, if you're broke (like me!) and want to do it at home, make sure that you do your research and try to rope in a friend to dye it for you to avoid any patchiness.

Also, consider spacing out the steps over a few days/a week, just to give your hair some much needed time to recover. ...I mean, I know I did mine all in one day, but that's just because I'm impatient and a bit of a hypocrite!

As always, thank you so much for reading if you made it to the end and if you have any further questions, please feel free to ask me in the comments below!