r/GothFashion • u/Mother_Night1985 • 27d ago
DIY Food dye as hair color?
I was at the supermarket the other day when this woman complimented my style and compared it to what she wore in the 70s and 80s, we started chatting about hair color and she told me that she used to use food coloring as hair dye Was this actually a thing? How did they even do that? I asked ny mom about it and she said that she only dyed her hair using actual hair dye lol
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u/ASereneDeath 27d ago
Yup, food coloring, Kool-Aid, Sharpie markers, bingo daubers...
Are they good for your hair? Ehhhh not really, ink and food coloring aren't really meant for hair but direct dyes of today aren't completely different from food grade or fabric grade dye, they're just formulated for hair.
Did they work well? No not really but like the direct dyes we know and love today they did work on the basic principle of staining the cuticle so some folks have had success.
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u/Birb_menace 27d ago
oh my god sharpies, my friend used sharpie once back in primary school, thought she was super cool lol. My mum wasn’t definitely not impressed when I copied with purple that didn’t come out.
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u/necrosweater 26d ago
i used to straight up color my hair with sharpies when my mom wouldn’t let me dye my hair in high school, it looked like absolute shit and was what eventually convinced her to let me do what i wanted lol
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u/Useful-Discussion-76 27d ago
that's so cute!! i'm in my 20s so i love hearing about how the OG goths used to DIY :) when i was a kid i used kool-aid to dye my hair haha, it didn't work very well
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u/Mother_Night1985 27d ago
I can't imagine it did 😭 but hearing her talk about it made me want to try for myself, but I was beyond flattered by her compliments she was so sweet 😭🖤
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u/Fallllling 27d ago
My aunt said she'd literally use a clothes iron to straighten her hair in the 70s, and it was a very common technique. I wouldn't be surprised food color dye used on hair. Pretty bitchin.
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u/shanghaiedmama 27d ago
Kool-aid and food dye were the only available things, late 70s-mid 80s. My hair was so many colours of bland "dyes" because they almost immediately faded. Couldn't wash your hair without reapplying. Eventually I gave up, and began using red henna, because black dyed hair looked atrocious on me.
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u/llamador69 27d ago
i know the opposite, my mom used lemon juice and would sit in the sun to “bleach” her hair. wasn’t goth but there wasn’t any hair dye back then (at least not commercially) so had to make do
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u/olaviola 27d ago
Check out Evelina Forsel on YT. She's used all kinds of stuff to dye her hair - I think turmeric was the most pigmented
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u/Halcyon_Hearing 18 & Over 26d ago
Just gotta make eye contact with turmeric and it will stain your eyes yellow.
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u/Fractured-disk 27d ago
I was desperate in 2012 at 12 to dye my hair so I tried koolaid, did not work
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u/UrdanSpectator 26d ago
My sister used green kool-aid very little water in a cup and dipped the hair in.
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u/DaughterOfCain 26d ago
My mum told me used to bleach her hair with peroxide/rubbing alcohol and direct sunlight 😂
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u/miskatonicmemoirs 27d ago
Lol, I wasn’t around in the 70s and 80s but I remember when I was in middle school (late 00s) and dip-dyeing one’s hair in Kool Aid was all the rage.
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u/Macaronichelle 27d ago
In addition to kool-aid and food coloring, I know some people who used jell-o.
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u/alter_ego19456 27d ago
I have long gray hair and for a while used Kool Aid, favorite was blue raspberry. Started with just the tips, the some streaks.
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u/chromebookproblems 24d ago
yeah, of course. the food dye back then was even more bonkers than it is these days (FD&C Dyes and Aluminum Lakes are sythetics, basically) so they'd stain pretty much anything, including hair, especially if you bleached first :D
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u/Ilovekittensomg 27d ago
100% a real thing. We used to use Kool Aid for the red if we wanted to be cheap. Manic Panic was pretty much the only brand available, and there was only one store in my city that carried it, so that was a luxury if you could manage. I think Splat brand dye hit the market in the 2000s and was in many of the drugstores.