Going to the internet for advice

[liv]

I have a diverse and wise circle here, so let's see if you can help me fix small things in my life:

Hair dye
I want to purple my hair again, it hasn't been purple since I was an undergrad. I am a bit reluctant to bleach my hair, and it's a sort of mid-brown that is too dark to take dyes very well. So either I want to bleach just part of it, maybe streaks, or maybe just do the tips, or else I want to use several coats of a nice bright dye and accept that the purpleness is going to be fairly subtle.

Does anyone have any recommendations for good purple dyes? Years ago I used the Stargazer semi-permanent brand. It was easy to use and gave me a good colour, but it really really wasn't fast; it was sold with the claim it would last 8 washes and it barely lasted one. And even before I actually stood under the shower it kind of leaked all over my clothes whenever my hair got even slightly damp. I have quite long (about thigh-length) hair, which is somewhat curly and somewhat thick. I've generally found hair products marketed at white people to be adequate for me.

Also, does anyone have a link to a good tutorial on how to go about bleaching and dyeing? I'm not very competent at it and I think I could do with some hints. How to make up the bleach correctly, as well as how to dye neatly and get even coverage, how to avoid getting the bleach and the colour everywhere.

Menstrual cups
I feel a bit bad that I haven't managed to make the switch to reusable menstrual products yet. Does anyone have any personal experience of using a menstrual cup, any recommendations for or against? Opinions about brands would also be useful; the ones I've heard of are Divacup and Mooncup.

My periods are usually what marketing departments call medium to heavy, but not actually heavy compared to people whose lives are really disrupted by periods. Fairly regular, tend to last about 5 days to a week. I am not particularly bothered by getting blood on my hands or poking about in my bits generally. I do need to have the ability to manage the business while I'm travelling, so if it's very faffy I might have to carry on using disposable products when I'm away from home. I have a coil fitted, which I assume won't make any difference, but I'm particularly interested to know of any reason why that assumption might not hold.

Laptop
Part of The Plan would benefit from having a laptop I can keep at jack's; yes, I can carry my main computer back and forth between Stoke and Cambridge, but it's a bit of a barrier and I'm trying to reduce the friction of travelling between work and home as much as I can. So, I'm in the market for a laptop, and I'd like recs of either brands or retail sites where I can source one. In particular, any hints for where I can still pick up a computer running Win7? Budget: preferably under £500, depending what's out there.

Basically this laptop is going to be almost purely for work. So it needs to be powerful enough not to be frustratingly slow, and to run things like Photoshop and deal with large, hi-res images. It doesn't need to be a high-end gaming machine, though. I need a reasonable screen size and resolution, but I don't want a computer that's physically huge. Ultra-light is not necessary. The reason I'm asking about Win7 is that I somewhat need Windows to be compatible with work-related software; Photoshop itself is non-negotiable for a start. I have heard very very mixed things about Win8, but maybe at this stage it's too late and I won't be able to get the older OS for any reasonable amount of money. But I'm not absolutely fixated on that OS, I could hear arguments for other possibilities as long as you acknowledge the purpose I want this computer for, rather than some theoretical ideal of what OS is overall "best".

And finally, Tube-themed music for my sister's thirtieth. Details over at mix_tape. This seems like a really good one to crowd source, especially clever puns on Tube station names.

Comments

Hair Dye

[wildeabandon]

I use L'Oreal and it gets my hair pretty bright without bleaching - I think our hair colours are reasonably similar. It is permanent though, so you'd have to dye over it to go back to your natural colour, but as such it stays vibrant a lot longer than the semi-perm ones, and is about the only brand that does permanent purple as far as I can tell. I'm also not entirely certain whether they entirely avoid animal testing, which I imagine is something you care about more than I do.

If I'm dying my own hair I just slap it on any old how, but with hair as long as yours, it's probably a lot easier to get someone else to do it for you. I'd be happy to if we're going to be in the same town at a suitable time. (I used to work as an assistant in a hairdressers as a teenager, and although I never actually dyed hair professionally, I picked up a fair bit).

If someone else is doing it, they'll have a much easier time of it with a proper hair dye brush than using the applicator nozzle. The method I use is to part the hair into four quarters, and apply the dye to the first inch or so of hair along both partings, then work diagonally through each quarter, again applying dye to the first inch or so of hair. Once you've got full coverage on the roots, start again at the centre, this time applying dye along the full lenght of hair; once it's all applied, massage through the length briefly, wind it up to keep it out of the way, and cover with the plastic cap supplied (or clingfilm) whilst you wait. If your hair is fairly robust, then it's fine to leave it on for a bit longer than the guildelines say (wash it off immediately if it starts to sting or burn, but don't worry about gentle tingling or itching).