Should I Wrap My Hair After Doing Henna?
I always get the question should I wrap my hair with saran wrap when I apply henna? The answer is nothing miraculous, just test and trial of doing hundreds of heads and talking to thousands of people using henna hair dye.
It is a long story, however in my years of doing “henna” I was doing tattoos on two girls graduating high school. I was not an artist by any means, so I used templates. Basically stick on the template, apply the henna , remove in an hour and viola.
In this particular case, one of the girls had to return to school to take her final exam, they both got hearts on their shoulders. The one returning to school, I saran wrapped and sent her on her way. I didn’t want her to smudge it on her clothes. Later about 6 pm the one with saran wrap called and said she removed the wrap and there was no stain, not even remotely. I asked about her friend who got the exact same one and she said it looked beautiful. They both came back and I was in aww how good the one looked and shocked to see the other had no color whatsoever, like it was never done. So I did another one and the next day she called and said thanks, it looks great.
I was only doing hair dye for a year at this time in 2007. I had done many events, parties, festivals, fundraisers, you name it I did it. I have tattooed 3000 students in high school shutdowns in one night. When I was doing the tattoos the powder being fresh made all of the difference in the world. I noticed some places I had to leave it out for 24 hours, add lemon, this that etc.
Then I tested over 200 crops around the globe and the results were astonishing. Where and how it grows makes all the difference in the world. At this point I was a mad man in the kitchen, mixing henna every single way you could find on the internet. This continued for years as I was fascinated by the aspect of henna. After all, everyone said to wrap it on your head. I dyed my family’s hair, my neighbors hair, peoples hair I never even knew, my maids hair and her sisters hair, my hair. One thing for sure was, wrapping it kept it from working as well. Henna needs to release (as well as indigo) in order to produce dye. At the time Catherine Cartwright Jones, (the one with the PHD in henna) said it was crucial to wrap your hair, so in the beginning I followed this because she was an “authority” in henna. What I learned is letting it breath produced much better results. Even to this day you can mix henna or indigo in a baggy and seal it and 2 days later it will not have released. Add a small amount of air and poof, you have dye.
So what I did was, find the best quality henna and indigo ( a lot of factors in this) and you do not have to do all of the “myths” to get it to release. Catherine called it “body art henna” however it is flat out henna that is not expired and 75% of what is on the market is expired, so it takes way more effort to get a stain out of it.
Tattoo artist love my henna because they can mix it on the fly and do tattoos with in an hour.
With the color you are using ” light brown” it is about a 40/60 mix of henna and indigo. We add other natural conditioners which makes it extra conditioning. With that said, henna releases for months and stains for months, indigo releases for hours. So let’s say you leave light brown on your head for 4 hours, the henna will take over and you will be left with red. The same goes for most of the browns. I had a lady tell me she used dark brown and she woke up and it was bright red. I asked ” how long did you leave it on?” she said, “well, I figured if an hour was good, all night was better!” YEP she slept with it in her hair. So the little bit of “fresh henna” took over and did its job.
On certain people we might recommend doing different things, so be careful of what you read on the internet and how you apply it. In the case some say leave it on for hours or overnight before applying , it could be the simple fact it is not fresh. It also more than likely is in reference to henna (natural red) not a henna/indigo mix.
The simple fact is; If you have really good quality henna (red) and you wrapped it, it would work. But it would work better not wrapped, I can state for a fact all of the hairs of head I did, it always came out better not wrapped. Also there might be some people that actually works for, but all of the videos, etc are referencing pure henna, not browns etc.
2018