Review: LUSH Caca Rouge Henna Hair Colour

It has officially been four months since I dyed my hair using Caca Rouge henna from LUSH, so it's about time I wrote up a full review on my findings and my whole experience with hennaed hair.

The instructions that came with the henna indicated to use a 'bain-marie' to melt the henna in. Now we had no idea what this was, so we instead used a pan of boiling water with a separate dish balanced over it. I put the henna block into a carrier bag and hit it with a hammer until it was in as small pieces as possible (powder is usually desired, but LUSH henna is far too bulky for that) then slowly added pieces to the bowl and kept stirring. We had to keep boiling the kettle and pouring more water into the bowl as our home-made henna pan wasn't working as well as it could have, but before long we had a lovely cowpat cooking nicely in the kitchen



As you can see from the above photo, it looked like a bowl of poo, and it smelled just as bad. It wasn't a horribly unpleasant smell (nowhere near as offensive as hair colour stripper) and I did eventually get used to the tea-leaves-and-wet-moss smell it gave off, but it gave me an awful headache for the first hour as it's just so incredibly strong.

One thing that the other reviews don't mention is just how heavy it is. the henna started to set almost as soon as it was applied, and it felt wet concrete caked into my hair. As it dried it became heavier still, and it really weighed my head down when my hair was piled up.

I sat in the bath watching films for a couple of hours, as when using henna it's best to keep it as warm as possible, then very carefully moved myself into my bedroom to spent the following hours reading and watching television. Even though I had wrapped my hair in a carrier bag, pieces of henna still flaked away and made a mess on the bathroom rug when I trod on them. It was overall a very messy process!

I was really worried that the henna would badly clog our old plumbing system when I rinsed my hair out, but it's been four months now and my dad has only bitched at me once regarding hairballs in the pipes.