New Week - New Hair...

Today I had a business meeting followed by a hair appointment in Belfast. I stuck with my #FrOctober pledge to wear more dresses/skirts by wearing a black vintage skirt I picked up from Danielle in Vintage Pintage the other day, along with a denim shirt and black wool jumper..

Shirt - Gerry Weber
Jumper - H&M
Skirt - Vintage
Belt - Accessorize
Ankle Boots - River Island

I headed into town first thing and had enough time to quickly drop into Zara to check out a coat I'd spotted online and on another woman last week. I had a minute to to try it on and confirm the love...

Applique Coat - Zara - £129

It's a gorgeous fit and the detail is a welcome departure from the dearth of studs everywhere - more like tiny metal pimples and unlikely to injure your children when you hug them!

Next I headed to the Belfast Welcome Centre to pick up some tickets for myself and 6 friends for our girly night at Belfast Fashion Week's High Street show on Friday 19th October. They are selling out fast so click on the link on the top of my page to book yours before they do!

After a social media discussion with a couple of great PR girls, I headed to Bill Harris Hairdressing for an appointment. Just yesterday, I was asked to be a training model for a friend's daughter. She's an accomplished hairdresser already but was training in a new colour range that the salon is introducing. They were looking for people who needed colour correction and thanks to a few too many home colour kits, I fitted the bill perfectly.

Here's the before shot - which actually at this distance and with a rubbish phone camera, looks ok. But there is about an inch of regrowth and the lengths of it had become colour resistant as a consequence of too much home colouring..

The final colour would not have bound itself to the hair properly, so the first step was to strip the home colour out, using a mix of bleach and shampoo. Here is the loveliness that results from such a process..

Step two was to re-pigment the bleached hair to get it to a better shade to take the final colour. Once this step was washed out, the final permanent tint was applied for 30 minutes. 
4 hours and a fab blow-dry later...here I am with my gorgeous hairdresser, Katrina who was so patient with my thick coarse hair.

I'm loving the rich chestnut tones that Katrina introduced to my hair. It suits my colouring really well and is going to be easier to live with from a re-growth point of view. And the best bit - it was completely free as it was a one-off special training session for this new colour range.

BUT if you're in the Belfast area and would like to help the trainee hairdressers and bag a bargain hair colour or cut, you can make an appointment to be a training model directly with the salon. Colours are done on a Wednesday from 5.30pm with prices from £10 and all treatments are fully supervised. Having heard from Katrina about the downsides and risks of home colouring, I'm going to be taking this option from now on. (NOTE: Starts in January - no training done in the lead up to Christmas)

I'll finish with the total outfit from today - I need to show you my coats and bags more often as clearly they are a big part of a daily outfit in this cooler weather. Over my outfit from the first picture, I wore my Karen Millen trench and brought along my Billy Bag mahoosive black tote - lots of room for notebooks, kindle, phone etc...

I hope you had a great Monday too...back to porridge tomorrow for me with the two school runs and a morning of volunteering..see you all then!