Thursday 26 March 2015

Hyperopic vision problems

Hello,

I just wanted to give you a health update and ask for some advice. I had the most horrible week last week. I had a migraine all week that resulted me needing to go to a hospital in the middle of the night.

They found nothing wrong and thought it might be my prescription and sent me to an emergency appointment with an optometrist, but they found nothing wrong with my prescription.

I am fairly frustrated with my eyes at the moment and if you have any experiences or tips to share with me — they are the most welcome! Especially if you have similar eye-sight to mine. 

I've spent ages trying to search experiences that are similar to mine, but found nothing. I was almost hopeful when I found a promising YouTube-video made by a lady who was far-sighted, but then she started talking about Jesus and how he gave people different prescriptions and then started reading out bits from the Bible, and it wasn't really what I was looking for. But if you are looking for a "short discussion on receiving the prescribed vision adjustment and having the eyes of your heart enlightened through the true Counselor, the Holy Spirit" then feel free to watch her video. It was interesting, but I really was just looking for people's experiences with contact lenses when dealing with far-sightedness and astigmatism. But I just found experiences from people who were near-sighted.



Let me just tell you a little bit about my eyesight.

According to my mum, I had bad strabismus when I was little and wore glasses since I was 2 years old. This might be the reason why I still can't see 3D.

My strabismus, however, got pretty much fixed and I was able to see well without glasses — I stopped wearing them when I was 13. Then five years ago, I got reading glasses that I wore when I was working on something. Then, I started getting migraines that may have been caused, or at least made worse, by the contraceptive pill. I didn't want to make them even worse by needing to strain my eyes too much and started wearing glasses everyday.

According to my prescription I am far-sighted and have astigmatism. So when I sit on a sofa at home and look in front of me, the world looks like this:


How I see the world.

It's difficult to see things near me, but I can see well far away. This is fixed when I put my glasses on. After last weeks migraines though I started wondering whether they actually could be caused by the fact that my glasses keep constantly sliding down my nose.

I figured that if I wore contact lenses I most definitely wouldn't have that problem because they would stay on my eye. It just apparently cannot be that easy. I did write about my initial contact lens -struggle but the saga continues. I wore contact lenses at work for almost a year and was able to see things that were close to me but I had no hope seeing far away. I realised how bad my eye sight is with my contact lenses when I tried wearing them again last weekend to stop the headaches.


My vision with contact lenses.

Sure I can read medication leaflets with my contacts in but activities like watching TV are completely out of question. Unless I move it on the coffee table, approximately half a meter from my face. That's what I had to do last weekend. But it just isn't very practical.

I guess the way I see the world with contact lenses is quite similar to how most young people with bad eye-sight see the world. At least I've met far more near-sighted people than far-sighted people.

I'm going to go and see the optician again and ask about this, because I don't understand why it's happening since as far as I understand, my prescription is pretty much the same for both; my glasses and contact lenses. But I would also like to know about your experiences! Have you got similar experiences with contact lenses?!

In the mean time, I've solved my vision problem by properly attaching my glasses to my head.



I tied some hair ties around the frames. I then attached the hair ties to this beautiful headband with a hair pin. This keeps my glasses still, but makes it more annoying to take them off. But at least the headaches have stopped for now!

Any words of wisdom or personal experiences?

Also, if you came to look at pretty pictures and have not yet learned that this is not the best place for that, I would like to apologise your disappointment and the fact that I haven't really had the motivation to try and look presentable or tidy the house or use a proper camera to take these pictures. They are here mostly for expressional purposes.

Saturday 7 March 2015

Golden Hair!

Hi!

Surprises, I got bored with my hair again! I dyed it earlier with some non-permanent hair dye, which gave my hair a nicer shade, but after about a week I decided I wanted to try something different and decided to try a permanent hair dye.

I wanted to try and get my hair a bit lighter. I could have of course bleached my hair. I've heard that Jerome Russell Bblonde -line is good, but I decided to be a rebel and experiment something that I thought would be a bit gentler. I did a little bit of online research and watched some convincing YouTube-videos and decided to try out a brand called Naturtint. They have a very good colour chart and it had clear instructions how to mix the colours to get a shade you might want. I'm not sure if most self-use hair dyes do that because I'm very new to this hair-dying business. But for me it made it a lot easier and I was more confident about trying out this hair dye.


When I started my hair was maybe a bit an ashy light brown colour, with some lighter highlights? This was mostly due to my previous hair-dying experiment. Naturtint recommended to choose a colour which is 2 shades lighter than my starting colour, so I actually should have probably chosen the colour 9N. But of course I was a rebel and didn't follow the recommendations. I chose the lightest colour: 10N. But I wanted to believe that 10N would be more effective. I have no way of testing this theory, but I'm just going to show you what happened to my hair and make some sort of a review of this product.



I ordered this dye online, but you can also find it at Holland & Barrett and maybe at some other health shops. I'm not sure if this product is any healthier than most box hair dyes, but it doesn't contain ammonia, parabens, silicones, paraffin, mineral oils, heavy metals, artificial fragrances, SLS or formaldehyde derivates. I guess it's good that some of these are not included. I don't really need my hair dye to be fragranced. But I'm sure ammonia for instance has been replaced by some other chemical that does the same job. You can dye your hair darker with henna and coffee* but if you want to go lighter like me, you need some peroxide and other stuff.

The boxed contained the usual things: colourant, developer and gloves. So I put the gloves on and mixed the colourant and the developer. Unfortunately, I was a bit useless and run out of dye. But I combed my hair to get a more even spread and it was all OK after that.  One box is actually enough for shoulder length hair if you know how to spread it. So if you are new to hair dying and use this hair dye I recommend that you mix the dye in a bowl so that you can see how much dye you have left.



Apparently I'm just asking for rude anonymous comments by adding these unflattering photos here.... I don't know if all hair dyes are like this, but I found it really easy to comb my hair like this. Then I just hang out for 40 minutes before I went back to bathroom to wash my hair.

First, I tried to rinse all the dye out of my hair, but it was a bit difficult because my hair was so dry it just felt like one big knot. But I did that until the water seemed clear and then I decided to shampoo it.



The box provided samples of shampoo and Naturtint Nutrideep Multiplier Protective Cream which is a conditioner/hair mask. I guess the shampoo is a toning shampoo. It foamed a lot and left my hair feeling even more like knot. But at least it no longer felt like there was hair dye left. Then I tried the Nutrideep Multiplier and it smoothed all the knots straight away. I left it on for 2 minutes as instructed and then rinsed it out. It was fantastic! I actually ordered two tubes of it so that I could keep using it. Best conditioner I have ever tried! My hair has never really needed a conditioner though, so I've just used whatever, so I am not the most experienced person in this field. But for me it was amazing.



Under my living room light the colour looked very golden. Naturtint actually has dyes that have a more golden shade. I had chosen a more natural shade, but the result still looked more golden. I feel that if I look at their colour chart, I went from 7N to 8G with their hair dye 10N. But it's okay, I really liked the result. And it didn't look as brassy as some other blonding attempts I've seen.



It's entirely possible that my hair doesn't even look that golden outside. But I rarely realise to take selfies outside, and unfortunately, I don't have anyone who would just spontaneously take photos of me. It would be useful in this sort of situations. 

But I'm curious and wanted to try and see what silver shampoo would do to my hair, even if I wasn't trying to go platinum. So I went and bought Pro:voke's silver shampoo.



I found that it worked well, although the result might be more noticeable if my hair was lighter. I apologise for random drunken bathroom photos, but the Hilton just had better lighting than my flat does. Apparently the lighting makes a big difference here which I maybe should have realised before. Maybe in the future I'll try to be awake and alert while the sun is up. After that I can provide you with some proper before and after photos.



But I found this dye very good and I can recommend it! As long as you're prepared for it to go a bit more golden than what the picture suggests. The company actually does mention that on their website as well, and suggests that you mix the neutral dye with their ashy dye (10N + 10A in my case), but I didn't want to do that this time because I was curious to see how the dye would work on its own. I'm really happy with the result. And this range has good colour choices and their dyes don't stink as awful as some other ones I've encountered before.

Have you tried any particularly good hair dyes? What do you think of this result?