I cut my own hair!

If you are a hair dresser or a professional in this area, just stop reading now.

Seriously.

Stop.

You will be horrified with what I decided to do on a whim.

Horrified.

And really, anyone who cares about their hair, spends good $ on hair cuts and color and takes more than say, 5min. each day to do their hair, you may want to stop reading too. Ok, so that pretty much eliminates everyone.

I'm not really sure why I decided to do this. It wasn't to save money, although the $100+ I did save by doing this is kinda cool. I don't know why. I'm just kinda crazy like that.

I started looking at YouTube videos for hair style ideas for my daughter. And, I came across several videos on cutting your own hair. I have been doing bang trims for the little girls for a while now, and I cut my son's hair for back to school (that's a brave 7th grader!), and, well, the natural next step is for me to cut 3+ inches off my own hair, add bangs, layers and color it. Myself.

Naturally.

Here is the before:

I don't have a real before pic because I always wear my hair pulled back into some sort of bun. This is because I hate wearing my hair down (especially in summer, but really all the time) and because my hair had grown so ridiculously long, I couldn't do anything else with it. On a good year, I get my hair cut and colored twice. Often, I go once a year. Clearly, my hair is not a priority. I am not sure this time around how long it has been since I got my hair cut. More than a year.

So, this before shows how long my hair had gotten and you can also see the ends are dry. It's basically all one length (there were layers at one time, but they are all grown out). It had some highlights as well (which were all grown out and faded at this point).

The first thing I did was cut off 3 inches. I was unable to find the YouTube video that showed this method, but basically, you start with a ponytail, then measure from the bottom up as much as you want to cut, tie a hair tie at that length. Then slide your first hair tie down just above the second one. Cut off just above the bottome hair tie.

Then I used this method to give it a little less of a blunt cut across the back:

Then I used this method to add some layers:

Then I cut some bangs. I can't find the video I used for this either, but there are tons of fringe/bang YouTube videos.

These are the bangs after I colored it. I didn't take any pictures of this process, it's your basic "Nice 'n Easy" home hair color kit. In dark brown, I think.

Here's all the hair I cut off:

After coloring while it was still damp, I put it up into 2 buns:

I wore this all day and then it was wavy for going out at night.

Here is the after:

I'm happy with it (but I am obviously not picky about my hair :) I knew I had so much hair to work with that if I totally screwed it up, there would be enough left for a professional to fix it. But, thankfully, no disasters and I may stay on top of my hair better now that I can just do it myself.