If I'm going to henna 8 years worth of untouched, undyed hair, you bet your sweetcakes I'm going to do a job of it! I was going to cut off about 5" of less than exemplary hair, but decided against it because I want to see how my ends behave after they've been hennaed. We'll have to see how well this takes - the last chemical dye, a permanent deep burgundy, only lasted about 2 days before it washed completely out. 

100g R-Expo Copal henna (mfg 2/2000 - yeeuch!) 
75g Yemen (mfg ?/2003) 
3/4 cup lime juice 
1/2 cup lemon juice 
1/4 cup hot water + 
1/2 tsp citric acid 

I mixed the hennas because I knew without a doubt that the Copal was dead;  it was so old and dry that I had to mash the clumps out of it, which was not an easy job.  I mixed this up in my glass rice bowl, loaded it into a sandwich bag on a paper towel, and waited for dye release.  The citric acid + water had to be used because I ran out of lemon & lime juices. 

2 cups water 
15 whole cloves 
13 large dried hibiscus flowers 
5 broken cardamom pods 
3"x1/4" lemongrass stick, snipped 
1/2 tsp Laxmi chai masala (for the scent) 

Everything was dumped into my trusty steel pot and simmered on high for 7 minutes.  I waited for it to cool, then poured everything, cloves and all, into a glass and left it on the counter for the final mixing the next day. 

3 ml Cypress 
3 ml Lavender 40/42 
3 ml Niaouli 
3 ml Palmarosa 

Dye had *just* started to release at 8:30 the next morning (13 hours later) when the henna got put back into the bowl.  I mixed in the terps and 1 1/4 cups of the reheated brew blend at this point and sat down to wait a few more hours. 

I terped this batch to push as much as I could from the Yemen, and hopefully get something out of the Copal.  I usually put only 0.75ml of terps into a 10g batch for skin, so I figured that 12ml total for 175g of powder would work well. 

I made it thick on purpose, so there were no drips; it was a lot easier going in than I thought it would be. Of course, now my head looks rather questionable (ha ha!) but at least I'm not leaving henna trails all over the house.  This can be more easily dealt with for some hours than the coconut oil, at least.  I ended up using most of it, and still had a good amount left over even after I'd heavily loaded as much as I could into my hair, which at this point is about 38" from front hairline, over the top, and down to the ends. 

Anyway, the mess sat for three & a half hours, at which point I went outside and soaked most of it out in three large buckets worth of hot soapy water, went inside, and washed it out with lavender baby bath and coconut conditioner. 

The color started out incredibly bright orange, but over five days developed very well into a gorgeous light reddish brown. My hair is definitely stronger - neither my hair nor my follicles give when strands are pulled - and when the strands finally do break, they make neat little spirally cone shapes instead of the straight ends from weak hair snapping.  It does have a huge tendency to snarl more tightly now, but the Infusium spray I use helps with that and doesn't seem to have affected the color.
 
 

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