After six years as a blonde, I’ve changed the colour of my hair.

Perhaps it was watching a doco on Florence Broadhurst, that had reminded me how it feels to have strongly coloured hair – described as “cochineal”, her crowning glory was bold and bright. I’ve had a lot of hair colours over the past 28 years, but it’s the colourful ones I love the best.

The incredible and inspiring Ms Broadhurst with some of her wonderful wallpaper.

Or perhaps it was watching Isabelle Faith, current contestant in Australia’s Next Top Model (caution: that link has an auto-play video with sound) lose her beautiful and stunning pink and blue hair, during her metamorphosis into high fashion model. Here’s Izzy from my Wintersun vintage swimwear parade last year. She gets my vote!

I’ve always admired the way old ladies used to dye their hair outrageous colours like peach, blue, lavender and pink – but sadly, these days most of our grandmothers prefer more natural shades. A pity: the artificial colours were a clear message to the world that actually, what we thought wasn’t so important any more.

Mollie Sugden as Mrs Slocombe in “Are you being served?”.

I’ve been looking forward to my blue rinse future but I’m a long way off elderly – and my hair isn’t progressing to grey as fast as I’d like either. I was also bored with the blonde hair, so a change was called for. My lovely friend Cass, who runs Wildilocks invited me into her salon to see what we could do about it.

At first we talked about dusty pinks and lavenders, but I’m not afraid of colour, only drab colour, so we went for something stronger. My blonde hair had some regrowth, and also was a bit too golden for Cass’s purposes, so step one was bleaching the roots and getting some of the yellow out.

Then came the colour – a corally light pink for most of it, and a more intense hot pink for around the edges, so that when I do my ’40s rolls, you get a variation. It also means that when I wear it in an up do, the strong colour will dominate. I couldn’t believe the colours….so intense! But how they look in the pot isn’t how it turns out. Well, not usually.

Here Larnie is starting to put the colour on, starting with the light colour on top…that’s Nikaya in the background. Hi Nikaya! Nice to see a familiar face at the salon.

Here’s a shot of the colour when it’s all on – you can see the two colours, light on top, and stronger underneath. Yum!

The process took hours, but it’s worth it because the colour is amazing…Nellie washed it all out and blow dried it next.

Pretty amazing, huh? Then for the final touch, Cass put some ’40s style rolls in for me – she did a great job too (did I mention that they also offer vintage hairstyling?).

Thanks Cass and everyone at Wildilocks – I love it!