Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Hair dye is hard with color

I must, by now, give up trying to develop with a new oppened tube of professional hair dye containing developing agents.

I simply could not repeat the experiment I did with an old portion of hair dye, that gave a positive image in a C-41 film, witch could be scanned directly by reflexion.

I tried every possible combination hair dye and alkali, I used Sodium Hydroxide and Sodium Carbonate, change proportions and no result except the poor one that I described in the previous post.

Then I was thinking why is it so difficult to get it working. Maybe the natural aging process builds CD-4 from the hair dye components. And because CD-4 is not present, no color is developed or very little. So, I added some CD-4 to a hair dye soup in Sodium Carbonate. Yes, then I could reproduce the former experiment with the old hair dye.

To be sure that was the point, I will leave the rest of new hair dye in the same shelf for 1 month and then try again, without CD-4.

The film is still drying, latter on and will add some photos here. These photos are from inside, in a piece of film just for testing. But I am leaving home in a while and make some photos outside.

Hair dye plus CD-4, bleach bypass, direct positive image

2 comments:

Caffenol Carioca said...

Sorry about that. You put a lot of work on it.
Mas se serve de recompensa, o efeito final fica muito interessante e bonito.

Anonymous said...

Hi, hair dye project sounds interesting! I hope you are still trying...
Just two quick questions:
(1) What was pH of the first (hair dye) developer? If your dye contains N,N-dimethyl-p-phenylenediamine (pKa = 6.59) or p-phenylenediamine (pKa = 6.31), you should keep pH above these values, like pH ~ 7, to keep it a neutral molecule. In acid, ppd becomes cationic and it would be harder to get them into the film.
(2) How do you decide how much of dye you should use? Is there any information of the content amount, like in g/L, on your dye bottle?
Cheeeeers :-)