Our Hair Smells Like Kool-Aid

Last night, we dip-dyed our hair in kool-aid. It might sound kind of strange, but it really does work. The great things about dyeing your hair with kool-aid are as follows: 1) it's super inexpensive 2) it's easy to do and 3) it will eventually wash out on its own. The downside is that there's no way to know going into it how the color will turn out. That said, if you absolutely hate your new look, all you have to do is trim off the ends of your hair. (Soaking your hair in a hot water / baking soda mixture is supposed to lighten the color, so that could be another option if you'd rather not go for the scissors.) With that in mind, maybe you'll be brave enough to try it.

If you'd like to know how, here's what we did:

Mix a kool-aid powder of your choice in boiling water. If you want the color to be stronger, don't dilute it too much. We used a mug as opposed to a bowl for a more concentrated mixture (plus, the handle made it easier to maneuver the steaming-hot liquid without scorching our hands). This time around, we each used one packet of kool-aid, but you can use two or three if you'd like. (More on that later.)

Sarah: Since my hair is shorter and thicker, we decided to tie it off into three sections and dye them one at a time to make the color more even. I used the berry blue flavored kool-aid, which showed up as a blue-green since my hair is a kind of wheat color. As you can see from the photo below, the color took better in some parts than it did in others, making it more like blue highlights. Katie speculates that this has to do with the thickness of my hair. We dipped each section in the dye for about 3-4 minutes total. We found that it's best to try to keep the mixture at a very hot temperature for the entire process. If it starts cooling down, just reheat it in the microwave for about a minute and do the next section.

Sarah's hair

Katie: My hair is long and thin, so I didn't feel the need to divide it into sections like we did for Sarah. I put all my hair in a low ponytail and Sarah dipped the end into the mug of dye for five minutes. I was going for a purple color (using grape flavored kool-aid), but the effect ended up being very subtle. I'm guessing that if I had used two packets of kool-aid, the results may have been more pronounced. I do know from the one other time I kool-aid dyed the ends of my hair (about a year and a half ago) that cherry red shows up really well even in brown hair. However, I did use two packets that time. Comparing the results from then and now, I would suggest using two packets, unless your hair is very light in color.

Katie's hair 

Since we like fun hair colors but we're not bold enough at this point to dye all our hair, kool-aid dye is a great way to go for us. Plus, we can check another item off our summer to-do list!

P.S. To our one e-mail subscriber: Sorry for the double notifications on this post. We accidentally hit the publish button before we were ready. Love you! Thanks for subscribing! :)