My journey to achieve my current light-medium blonde hair colour was not a short one, in fact it started over nine months ago and it took me several bleach + toning session to achieve the colour that is now very close to what I originally wanted. My hair is natural dark brown, it's thick and very dry, so I had just about everything stacked against me achieving the desired colour. This actually isn't my first rodeo, as I had some blonde highlights in my teens and back then no one even used a toner one me or told me I have to do a second set of bleaching, so I ended up with very orange looking highlights (which I later dyed over with a red colour, another hair stylist disaster that I ended up covering with a dark brown and stopped colouring for over a decade). Now I took my time to educate myself well about bleaching, toning, what to do to prevent damage, which was my biggest concern, and how to achieve the balayage look I wanted. I'm not one to just jump into doing something reckless so I spent months researching and also testing on individual strands before I did anything, yet I still made some mistakes I wish I knew about before. I was remarkably stupid to do all of this on my own because, well for one I wanted to, so I can learn the process myself, but also because I still don't have a lot of trust in hairdressers when it comes to my hair (just experience, I'm sure there are brilliant hairdresser's out there). Doing it professionally is so expensive and I would feel awfu...