Ok, here goes. I'm not a professional hair colourist, but I am a long standing veteran of home hair colour - I've had my hair all colours, all lengths, all styles and at the moment it's jet black. I've broken all the cardinal rules of hair colouring, and I can safely say that it's too much of a gamble to take.

Now, I'm naturally a very pale blonde. I take a lot of criticism for this, i.e. ''You're so lucky, why did you dye it? '' but hey, I just like dark hair. I did once successfully manage to lift my hair from black to blonde via bleaching (using the instructions, doing a strand test and conditioning like mad before and after), then I went back to dark again. I was very silly a while back and attempted to bleach my long black hair so that I could dye it red; I used a certain hair dye which burned the ends of my hair and I had to get about 3 inches chopped off. This was the first time I'd had a *real* disaster - I'd never used that particular home hair colour before and I'll never ever touch it again. It broke my heart having to get my hair lobbed off when I'd spent so long growing it - that was even worse than previous hiccups where I had to tolerate orange hair for a few days. I adored my long hair, and I won't ever mess about like that again.

So anyway, all that bleaching and burning took it's toll on my hair, so I covered it over with black again and spent some time looking after it's condition; my hair has now improved vastly and has even grown back down to shoulder length within a couple of months. Problem is that by leaving my hair alone for a while, I now have glaringly obvious pale blonde roots against jet black hair. Normally I'd just touch up my roots, but it's time for something different now, something that will tone down the sharp contrast of my roots as they grow through. I was thinking of perhaps lightening top sections of my hair to blend in with the roots - not highlights, as I had this done before and it looked awful - but actually lightening up the more obvious sections of hair to ''fit in'' with the blonde that keeps growing through at an amazing rate. I don't mind leaving bits underneath black, I just want to sort of help the process of my hair being a bit lighter so I don't look so bizarre anymore. I love the idea of blonde and black against each other, and I'd quite like to give that a go - anything that will mean I can just let my roots come on through and leave my hair alone again!

Any ideas would be most welcome, I'd like to do something as soon as possible as my roots are beginning to depress me!

I'm thinking perhaps use a semi or temporary colour on your roots? Have you tried that? They are less harsh than a permanent.

Also, do you want to grow out the black?

Yeah, I'd like to grow the black out - I'm not keen on semi/temporary dyes though as they rinse out so quickly only to reveal my blonde roots again, so I want to lighten up part of my hair to blend in with the blonde roots as they grow. I'm going to try a little highlight kit, doing a strand test first, and see how that goes - that way I can choose which sections of my hair I want lightened and focus on getting it right. If that works, then after a few goes I'll have blondish hair in sections and the black underneath, so my blonde roots coming through won't look so bad.