Fashion notes: Add some hue to your hair

Ximena Herrera. Vanni Bassetti / Getty Images

If you have admired coloured hair from afar, too timid to treat your own tresses to some vibrancy, it's time to take the plunge. I took time to warm up to the idea, proud of my long, thick(ish), dark hair, and unwilling to damage it in any way. But I decided to woman up, take a dramatic step and go for the ­"grombre" (grey-ombre) look I had seen on social media. If it turned out to be a disaster, I would just chop off the ends and sport a trendy bob.

I headed to Marquee’s hair salon on Jumeirah Beach Road in Dubai for a consultation with artistic director Catherine Hawkes. She warned me that hair must be bleached very light for grey tones to show up, and I told her to go for it. Long story short, after about four hours of stripping my hair of its colour and placing tone on top of it, I emerged with an ashy-blonde colour on the bottom half of my hair – much to the delight of my mother, who couldn’t comprehend why I would dye my hair completely grey. Alas, some things are just not meant to be.

Hawkes informed me that if I were to choose more of a pigmented colour, such as red or purple, I would have a better chance of it showing up on my hair. So in a spur-of-the-moment decision (which goes against all of my plan-­obsessed instincts), I opted for purple. I left the salon with my black hair fading into a dewy brown, with bright indigo ends – and I absolutely loved it.

Now, two weeks later, the ends have faded into more of a lavender tone. It may not be the unicorn-inspired hair colour that blondes can easily achieve, but it’s delightfully invigorating; not to mention ­confidence-boosting. I urge you all to give it a go. Just bear in mind that maintaining coloured hair long-term, especially if you’re a brunette, requires almost monthly trips to the salon for touch-ups.

My plan? Rock the purple until December, then ring in the new year with a shorter ’do.