Do or Dye

I recently ordered some hair on eBay to use as facial hair.  I have been wanting to try making a beard and/or moustache for a while, and now that I have some decent lace, I thought I'd give it a try.

This is the hair I bought:

The new hair still in the package

It is sold for doll-making, but the texture looked perfect for facial hair.  Also, the colour is a very light blonde, which meant that it should work well for colouring.  The hair is on a weft, which makes it easy to dye and keep organized.

The package says that it is 100% human hair, but to be honest I have my doubts.  The texture and feel of it are like no human hair I have ever felt.  I think it's probably yak hair, but for my purposes (and, I assume, for the purpose of doll-making) it doesn't matter.  Facial hair tends to be much coarser and more kinky/frizzy than head hair, so this works well.  My main concern was to find something natural (not synthetic) so that I could dye and bleach it.  Before attempting to dye the hair, I burnt a little piece on the stove, and by the smell alone I'm sure that it's not synthetic.  It's definitely either human or an animal of some kind.  Regardless of what type of hair it actually is, it was less expensive than similar quantities of yak hair that I found, so I'm really happy with the purchase.

I had bought three packs, and decided to cut each pack in half.  I then proceeded to dye each piece a different colour.

The hair comes as a very light blonde, #60.  I had to experiment a bit as the hair seemed to take some colours better than others.  It seemed the cooler tones wanted to go a sort of purple-grey, so I did a small test with each colour to make sure that it would give me the results that I was expecting.  I had found Clairol Nice 'n' Easy hair colour on sale, so I bought a selection of shades.  The light blonde that I tried didn't work on this hair, so I will have to try a different one.  However, these are the colours that were successful:

The freshly-dyed wefts hanging in my bathroom

The one that I'm most happy with is the white!  I didn't achieve that with a box dye, but with a toner that I made using hair conditioner and a small amount of Manic Panic Ultra Violet semi-permanent hair colour.  Again I had to experiment a bit to get the ratio right, and ended up with a few lilac test pieces, but finally got it spot-on and the results are fantastic!  Here's a close-up of the original hair (right) beside the hair I treated with the toner:

Before (right) and after toning with the home made violet toner

As you can see, the violet toner has removed all the yellow/blonde from the hair, and has left it a beautiful pure white.