Okay, well, I ultimately did NOT fail at dyeing a wig … but it was a process to get there.

Today I’m going to cover everything I did to get a warm white wig to this ridiculous colour for Lio.

First off — choose a base wig.

Gonna be real with y’all, this is probably where I fucked up.

So I generally buy most of my cosplay wigs from Kasou Wigs — I like their wig fibres more than Arda, and they have an insane amount of base wigs, a lot of times with things like spikes already low-key set up. Mostly I find they just need to be styled and trimmed. 

But ya bitch bought this wig IMMEDIATELY while I was still sitting in the theatre after having watched Promare during its original run. So obviously, Lio wigs didn’t exist yet. I bought a white wig, in a bob style with long bangs, and thought “eh, how hard can it be to dye a wig”.

WELL, EVERYONE. It’s real fucking hard sometimes.

First off, turns out that the wig I purchased is made of something called Hyperlon rather than Kaneklon — if you’re not familiar, these are basically just types of synthetic hair that are heat resistant to varying degrees. Most cosplay wigs are made out of these kinds of fibres.

Hyperlon, apparently, is super dye resistant.

But I did a lot of testing on my wig so that you don’t have to! 

Here’s the wig before I dyed it, but after I cut and styled it:

The first thing I did is the stovetop dye method — this is where you basically take some dye (I used RIT Synthetic in green and yellow), get some water to juuuuust below boiling, and then shove your wig in there and simmer it for up to two hours. Anyone who follows me closely on Twitter probably saw me freaking out about this.

(Note that the dye in that photo isn’t the dye I wound up using; I had someone pick up dye for me and they grabbed non-synthetic dye, and I took it back to the store and swapped it out before i did the actual dyeing.)

I simmered a bunch of the clippings from cutting the wig as a test, and after two hours of simmering (in a dye bath that was aprox. 5 litres of water and TWO ENTIRE BOTTLES OF DYE) te wefts looked like …. this.

Which is not exactly what I was going for.

After a lot of back and forth on twitter (with people being like “Did you try RIT synthetic” in response to my post which basically read “Fuck RIT Synthetic I hate everything”), I decided that I was going to try the Alcohol and Acrylic Method of wig dyeing.

The TLDR of that is that you get some acrylic paint, mix it up with some alcohol, spray it onto your wig, and then when it dries wash it and your wig should be dyed.

Literally everyone I talked to told me that this method is super chill and easy and I would be fine.

….. So obviously I had to do it twice because I fucked it up the first time.

First off, let’s talk about what I used. 

I went to the art store and bought this paint:

Because everything I read (and two people I talked to) told me to just go buy cheap-ass acrylic paint.

I cannot stress this enough — DO NOT DO THIS. 

Go buy high-flow acrylic, or even acrylic ink — the sort of thing meant for airbrushes. I had to thin this paint aprox 50/50 with airbrush medium. Otherwise I found it just didn’t mix appropriately with the alcohol, which nothing I found mentioned even a little bit.

So once I thinned this out, I had to make the alcohol and acrylic solution.

Essentially, what I did, was 1 Tbsp thinned out acrylic to 4 Tbsp of rubbing alcohol, in a spray bottle.

Here’s everything that I used. (Also measuring spoons but apparently I didn’t take a photo of those.) 

And here’s my setup:

That’s two kitchen garbage bags, slit open and taped on top of all of my stuff. There was a half-decent amount of splatter, and a LOT of dripping, so definitely set up something like this.

(You might also notice that my wig head and my wig are already just a touch green — that’s because these photos are from my second attempt at this, so read on if you’d like to know about that …)

Then it’s time to start spraying.

I think it took 2-3 spray bottles full of the alcohol and acrylic solution to really inundate the wig to the point where I was happy with how full of paint it was. (A spray bottle full would be 3-4 Tbsp of acrylic to 12-16 Tbsp of alcohol, for reference.)

I was brushing the wig out gently with a tooth comb as I went, to make sure there was alcohol and paint everywhere.

Then it was time to let it dry. I came back and gently brushed it out every now and then — which was good, because I found that the acrylic would kind of re-deposit on the bottoms of the hair, and if it dried there it left a big chunk of dried acrylic paint there. (Which wouldn’t happen with acrylic ink, or maybe further thinned down high-flow paint?)

Now, here’s where I fucked up again.

When you wash out the acrylic from the wig, DO NOT USE SOAP OF ANY KIND.

Fuck. The first time I rinsed the wig out, I used a touch of wig shampoo, and it just took all of the colour out, and I had to do all of that all over again the next day. 

So JUST RINSE IT WITH WATER. OKAY? OKAY.

Anyway, once that happens, let it dry again, and you’ll get … this.

So here you can see some of the crusty paint deposits on the wig. I wasn’t prepared for these either, but here we are. You can get rid of all of these by brushing the wig out with a fine-tooth comb. You’ll get little pieces of dried paint everywhere, and it’s going to make the wig incredibly static-y, but stick with it. I brushed out Lio’s wig for an hour or so before I was happy with it. I also trimmed out a couple of bottom pieces where there was just too much paint still stuck in the hair fibres.

To get rid of the static charge in the wig, just rub it with a fabric softener sheet! It’ll get rid of all of that static. (I always have like a dozen fabric softener sheets in my bag for cons, it’ll help with flyaways on your wigs and it’s a great way to bribe your hotel-roommates into liking you.)

And there we go! Lio! 

I’m still not 100% happy with this wig’s colour. I think I’d like it to be a slightly softer colour. I am finding that I’m getting happier and happier with it the more I wear it though, it’s looking less and less like I dyed it with cheap paint, haha.

And there we go! Lio! 

I’m still not 100% happy with this wig’s colour. I think I’d like it to be a slightly softer colour. I am finding that I’m getting happier and happier with it the more I wear it though, it’s looking less and less like I dyed it with cheap paint, haha.