I decided to buy a bunch of cute accessories on Taobao recently since I had already purchased a cosplay for Anime North 2015 from there, so heres a short post with some pictures of my haul ^u^

*omg I look so weird without circle lenses in that photo*

   

So in total I bought bunny and sheep ear hair clips, a fawn headband, a Milky phone case, three neck bow ties and a bow hair clip was included for free with my purchase. 

These are the three neck bow ties. They're all very cute and perfect for cosplaying or just to wear casually. My favourite is the dark pink, but I like all of them~

This is the phone case that I got! I'm so in love with it haha.

Lastly, here is a close up picture of the fawn headband. Again, it has the light pink colour on the inside of the ears, and the antlers are flexible so I can change their shape too. Very cute! 

   

This weekend, I decided to finally do something that I've been wanting to do for a LONG time, which is to ombre my hair lavender/purple. I have never dyed my hair non-professionally, so I was extremely nervous, but a lot of my friends and family have experience dyeing their hair at home so they gave me plenty of advice before I started.

  

   

The first thing I did was order all the supplies I would need from Sally's Beauty Supply, or buy them from Shoppers Drugmart (which is a Canadian drugstore chain.) 

I bought Manic Panic's Flash Lightning bleach for about $15, and Ion Colour Brilliance Brights in Lavender for $6, and Ion Colour Defence cream for $10 from Sally's. As well, I bought Inebrya Ice Cream toning mask in silver, and purple shampoo and conditioner from Shoppers Drugmart for about $30. While it seems like I spent a lot of money, it would cost around the same amount if not more to get it professionally done, and I would still have to buy the purple shampoo, conditioner and toning mask to maintain the colour. 

Ion Color Brilliance - Lavender

   

Once my package from Sally's arrived, I prepared my hair by using deep conditioner 3 days before I planned to dye it. Then, I showered with pH balancing shampoo 2 days before I dyed my hair, and didn't shower until after I bleached it, since apparently bleach works better on 2nd-day hair or something. 

So here is the before picture of my natural hair colour. You can tell that I used a really old shirt that my friend used to cosplay as Togepi when I went as Misty to anime north. (It wasn't a very good cosplay haha.) 

   

Here is the end result of the bleaching process:

After I finished bleaching, I rinsed out the bleach and used purple shampoo and conditioner, along with the silver ice cream hair mask to hydrate my hair a bit after the bleaching, and to tone down some of the brassiness left over from bleaching. 

My hair was left at a very light yellow, with some strawberry blonde shades in random parts of my hair (probably from the areas of my hair that are more red than brown?) 

   

After one day, I prepared my hair dye by mixing the lavender dye with white conditioner in a 1:1 ratio. It looked like a very dark purple colour pre-application.

Again, I applied the dye to the ends of my hair that were bleached and this dye I left for about 1 hour, since during my strand test the dye was taking a while to get the colour I wanted. After 1 hour, I rinsed the dye out and applied the ion colour protection cream. 

Here is a picture of the end result:

I am EXTREMELY happy with the way it turned out! I actually did not expect it to be this light of a shade of lavender, since my hair is relatively dark to begin with and I didn't want to bleach it to white since I didn't want to destroy my hair completely. My hair seems almost as healthy as it was pre-bleaching which is amazing. I think if I continue to use my Kromask, as well as the purple shampoo and conditioner when I shower, my hair will keep this colour for a while.