Chalk Block

In my never-ending quest to drastically change my hair for extremely brief periods of time (much to my mom's dismay), I decided to give hair chalking a shot tonight. For those of you who don't know what hair chalk is (which, I'm guessing is approx 100% of you), hair chalking is an "easy" way of using soft chalks to temporarily color hair. If you have been paying the least bit of attention to celebs and the runway lately, you've seen people with these colorful streaks that magically disappear by the after party. One way to achieve this look is with hair chalking.

It looked easy enough, based on the YouTube tutorial I watched. Buy some chalk, put it on your hair in cool, fun streaks and voila! Temporary rockstar! Here's the look I was going for:

Source: http://thebeautydepartment.com/2012/01/chalk-it-up/

Here's what I started with:

All that brown! GROSS! (Also, I do believe I am making a face like I'm smelling something ELSE brown. Whatevs.) So that's what I was working with, folks. So I got the tools:

Now, the tutorial calls for those plastic-y gloves, but I forgot to get some and I figured those gallon-sized Ziploc bags would be just fine.

Spoiler! They were NOT fine. They kept slipping off and it was like impossible to grab the tiny little strands of hair without the benefit of opposable thumbs, so it was a very messy, messy event. Plus, the chalk gets all wet and covers the ginormous bags so the colors mix and it's just all a very big to-do.

Also? I have BROWN HAIR. Drawing chalk on brown hair is like using a highlighter on tree bark. It was much less noticeable than I had hoped.

Okay, so when you're done chalking your hair, you're supposed to like DRY it and COMB it and then CURL it to lock in all the colorful goodness. But I'm not made out of time (or patience), so I just straight up brushed my hair, knocking 50 percent of the chalk to the ground. While my bathroom floor is now a positively glorious shade of tie-dye, my hair retained far less of the chalk than I had hoped. Here's what we ended up with:

Can you see the blues? The pinks? The yellows and the greens? NO? Well, it was cool in person. Here's a close-up on the good side:

Yeah, I know it's all rough and chalky, but again, I didn't have TIME to actually make it look NICE. UGH! But it's colorful!

Here's the upside of hair chalking. It's very temporary. Wear it for a night to spice up an outfit and it's gone the next day. The downside?

It's very temporary.

Seriously. It gets all over everything and will definitely run onto your clothes (note the change from white tank to black in the before and after pics) so you can't wear anything light or, you know, nice. Chalk dripped onto my skin and clothes. The second I got warm with my stupes Ziploc bags covering my hands, the chalk pasted itself to every bead of sweat. Every millimeter of moisture. God help you if you wear your hair chalk out in the rain.

Satisfied with my experiment, I hopped in the shower to de-chalk which was the dopest part. Washing your super temporary, multi-colored chalk hair makes every shower a hyper-color t-shirt with all the colorful water swirling around, which is just the best.

Verdict: While I will definitely chalk my hair again (much to my mom's dismay), I will only do it if I have loads of time, black clothes and lots more gloves. But I will DEFINITELY do it again. I guess you can CHALK it up to a refusal to learn my lesson. ZING!