L'Oréal Couleur Experte

Not once in the 10 years I've been dyeing my hair has there been an emergency involving tears, extra dye, hats and a stylist. Not until Couleur Experte, that is, which for $21.99 turned my perfect, beautiful strawberry blonde mane into the shade of a sunset in hell.

My natural hair color is the unfortunately named "dishwater blonde," so for the past 10 years or so, I've used various shades of red and brown to punch it up. Lately, I've wanted to make my base hair a deep reddish brown, with gingery highlights so I nearly wet myself with excitement when L'Oréal announced the release of Couleur Experte, a base-dye and highlighting kit designed to make hair look fabulous.

The $21.99 price tag was a bit daunting, but the picture on the Couleur Experte 5.5 Cinnamon Stick box was exactly what I wanted my hair to look like.

I set aside about two hours on a Sunday evening to do it. I even went to the website and watched a video demonstration on using Couleur Experte, just so I didn't screw it up. The first half of the process went pretty well. I washed it out and it looked — brown. I expected the base color to be a little lighter with more of a red tone, but all things considered, it looked OK.

Then came the difficult part.

I read in a magazine that L'Oréal spent 15 years developing Couleur Experte. One would assume that after 15 years of research and development that the highlighting part would be easy.

Oh no.

Other home highlight kits come with a hard plastic claw that you dip into some liquid before combing your hair. Couleur Experte comes with what looks like a mascara wand on steroids. The highlighter was not liquid — rather it was a paste that I mixed and mopped up with the mascara wand and then ran through my hair. My hair is thick, so running a big mascara wand through it wasn't nearly as easy as L'Oréal anticipated.

I decided to go for chunkier highlights in the front and then slightly thinner ones on the side and back. I had a hard time getting the fat mascara wand through my hair, much less evenly. By the time I got the front highlights in, I was almost out of paste for the rest of my head. I tried to pull the wand through the rest of my head evenly, in slim, small strokes, but the damn thing just wasn't pulling through neatly. It got stuck, I would pull it halfway down my head and then it would slip out and I'd have to find the exact same strand of hair and try and make it look like the top half.

By the time I finished with the back of my head, the front highlights had been working their mojo for at least 10 minutes. You're supposed to wait 15 minutes before washing the dye out, but I raced to the bathtub pronto. I could already see this wasn't going anywhere good.

The lovely ginger highlights promised on the box came out white-blond. I looked like a pudgy Midwestern version of Rogue. While the front highlights were bright white streaks framing my face, the side and back highlight were blotchy, uneven spots resembling pennies.

My husband/chief sympathizer and I ran out and bought a box of the darkest red dye we could find, which actually turned my hair pink. Within a period of four hours, I morphed from me to pudgy Rogue to a pleasantly plump version of Lola from Run Lola Run.

I wore a hat to work the next day. I eventually took it off, since my office isn't exactly the sort of place where hats are de rigeur, and my boss noted that my hair matched the pinks we used in a print ad we were working on. I ended up leaving work an hour early and going to my stylist, who spent two-and-a-half hours cleaning up my mess and noted that I was the salon's third client to come in after trying to use this stuff.

When she finished, my hair looked amazing — even better than the picture on the Couleur Experte box. Finally, I felt myself again. I kept touching my hair, staring at it in the mirror, almost shocked that this lovely deep auburn color replaced the pinky mess that I caused.

All told, my new hair color cost $145 — $21.99 for the evil coloring kit that started this whole mess, $8.99 for the all-over dye and $115 for the professional job that saved my follicles. For that kind of money, I could've bought myself 145 copies of Country Singles. It would've been more entertaining. Or I could've bought 7.25 bottles of the Hollywood Diet. It couldn't be any more unpleasant than what I'd gone through and I'd have the bonus of losing a few pounds for at least a day or two.

— Stephanie Kuenn (smkuenn at gmail dot com)