Hair Dye Stress!

So I've been dying my hair on and off (mostly on) since I was about 12 years old. Mostly shades of red in semi and then permanent dyes. For the last 3 ish years I've dyed it the same mahogany/ deep red colour. Now comes the panic. I use a professional dye which my mother's ex-hair dresser friend applies for me. Thus it will not be purchasable in Japan and if it was I'd make a right muck up of mixing and applying it alone!

D:

So now comes the obsessive researching into Japanese brand hair dye. *cry*

The results are that Japanese hair dye seems to be terrible for caucasian hair as they pretty much all contain bleach. Japanese people tend to have thick black hair, so their hair dye products are designed for such hair. My hair is medium, thin, easily damaged caucasian hair! ARGH! It seems they aren't great for your hair and they can fade too. Especially the reds. Stupid red.

So yesterday I tried using Lush henna on my hair! Lush is present in Japan so it would be easy to buy, it's natural and therefore okay on your hair and while insanely mess does not contain potentially damaging chemicals which I can accidentally mix wrong and turn my hair green! :D

The results are mixed... I tried CaCa Maron because I didn't want to go crazy first time with rouge. I got my mother's hair dresser type friend to apply it (CRAZY messy) and slept in it (around 14 hours). Overall it doesn't seem to have done much.... My dyed hair (most of my hair) seems slightly more brown, kind of a conker colour. My roots are a lighter, slightly reddier, colour than my natural medium ash. The roots do now blend in more naturally to the rest of my hair but it's still kind of obvious (maybe I'm just crazy?!). I suppose I'll see it is lightens more...
(I would provide photos but you can't really see....)

The absolute final straw will be to go get my hair stripped *cry* I really don't want to because my hair damages easily and it WILL KILL MY HAIR. And it's just gotten to my ideal length! And even then I'd want to re-dye/ henna it as my natural colour SUCKS and my greys keep multiplying despite only being 22 *cry* So hopefully it won't come to this.

Letting it grow out is not an option.

First world problems, eh?