So, for the last 3/4 of a year or so, I have been getting highlights, and slowly turning more blonde as the year passes by. After I left my job to stay home with my kids again, we no longer have the expendable income for me to go to a salon to do this. So I enlisted the help of a friend, who graciously came over with her 3 kids to help me highlight my hair. We had a super fun time, and our kids loved it, my son thinks her children are his "cousins"! Anyway, the hair turned out a little brassier than I was hoping and one side had quite a bit of blonde streaks in it compared to the rest of my head. No problem, there is a whole row of hair dye at our local Target! I got a decent looking light brown which I thought would cover up the blonde quite nicely. Got it home, tossed it on my head and.... bright red! All over! Oh. my. goodness. In an effort not to totally fry my hair, I kept the red overnight, figuring a small break before dyeing again, was better than no break at all. Morning came around, and we headed back to the ginormous row of hair dye. I figured that I had limited options to try and correct the "new me", so I grabbed a color called very imaginatively, Dark Brown. My three year old assured me that he thought it was a good color, and that was good enough for me, so I brought it home. Well, Dark Brown ended up being "Almost Black", plus I had the stains across my forehead, and I had to go the dentist later that night. My husband's jaw literally fell when I walked into his office to hand him the kids so I didn't have to bring them to the dentist with me. I am just going to call it my almost-middle-life-crisis-goth stage! Three rounds of hair dye in less than 24 hours can't be a good thing! Plus, I didn't actually ended up saving any money. With all of the different hair dyes I bought, I could have actually just gone and had it done for almost the same price. So the moral for me in saving money by not professionally highlighting is to stick with one color.