Feria Power Reds Intense Deep Auburn R48

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I DO NOT recommend this hair dye. Flat out, straight and forward, not a good dye at all and most reviewers out there agree. Which is why it got a 1 rose rating.
I know that your hair color will never turn out like the box, since my hair is naturally black, it's always darker, and I'm ok with that, I like my colors dark...but this hair dye....ugh.
For the past 2 years or so, I've been obsessed with dying my hair, and that obsession involved reds. I wanted to dye my hair something noticeable but nothing too outrageous. Weird coming from someone who used to bleach half her hair and dye it bright colors like hot pink and cotton candy blue or stick in different colored extensions. Anyways, since I've been obsessed with trying out different colored of reds in my hair, I've tried a lot of different brands and colors. Every single dye have dyed my hair to somewhat close to the box or a bit darker.
This dye, was the worst I've ever tried. It does not even look close. It's a dark, blood, cherry black color. You can't even notice the red until the sun hits it.

Background (before the dye):
My hair is naturally black, I've been dying it red for quite some time. The last dye I tried had amazing results but was not lasting at all, everyday I would see the dye come out and with other dyes I've tried, it would seep out for a week and afterwards, would be fine. This was the Garnier for darker hair with oils (not the one in my review section). I will not try that again either. So, before I dyed my hair, my hair has been faded from different tones of red (lighter by my roots, darker hair overall and lighter at my tips, the tones are due to my bleaching a long time ago and then having them grow out and trimming my hair). After the Garnier faded, my hair was a light brown to black and so I thought that it was time for a change. I actually really liked my hair before this dye job, it was red in the sun but brown and black otherwise so why I dyed my hair, I don't know. Actually, I do. Because I'm dumb. Because of the different colors in my hair or tones, everytime I dye it, regardless of which dye, it comes out with the different tones of the color...if that made any sense. It will all dye red but some parts will dye darker than others. This Feria dye, dyed my hair all ONE color, so that's weird.

During the dye:
The dye process was normal except for the many components to this dye. Most home box dyes has a big developer bottle with developer creme in it, the dye in a tinted bottle, directions, gloves, and a conditioner for afterwards (and maybe a small tube of oil). This one includes the developer bottle with cream in it, a dye in a tinted bottle, a tube of red dye, oils, shampoo tube, conditioner tube, gloves and instructions. In the box, it tells you to mix evrything in to achieve the color in the box, EVERYTHING. This made me think that the other reviewers who were unhappy, did not put EVERYTHING in and mix it. So this box comes with two dyes, a brown one and a red one. The brown one looks normal, brown, liquidy, looks like brown hair dye. Sign #1, why would a red hair dye contain this much brown hair dye, that's odd. Sign #2, why are they seperated, I don't know but the dyes that worked for me was already mixed and even though it isn't hard to put all of these ingredients in, I thought it was so the red could be super strong. I put in the oils last and shook it like no tomorrow. Started applying dye in my hair, and let me tell you, after 5 min, this dye burned my nose hairs and my eyes. I was literally crying the whole time and the fan was on. I've never gotten so teary-eyed before this dye, that's how strong it is. It was like any other home box dye, messy but I did it.

After the dye: I checked my hair numerous times and decided to keep going for another hour. My hair looked like it did not change to any form of red at all. After I followed the directions to take out the dye (can't remember if I had to shampoo or not), and then conditioned and rinsed, I waited for my hair to dry naturally to see the results. This turned my hair to almost black. Like an intense deep red black...all in one color. Since my hair has many different tones, I can't see why it did this. But it literally looked like it was black with a slight red undertone rather than a bright red like the box or any type of noticeable red. My hair did feel soft after the dye, probably due to the conditioner. The conditioner smelled pretty good BUT a warning, it has glitter in it. When it says "Shimmer Conditioner", it means it. It's shimmer conditioner due to the glitter in it, not because it's a conditioner that makes your hair super shiny (it gives it some shine but nothing completely amazing). So even when you rinse out this conditioner for many, many minutes at a time, the glitter will stick to your hair. And when it's dry, expect the glitter to rub on everything and fall everywhere. It's like I had shiny dandruff. I would only recommend this conditioner if you were going to go out clubbing or if you wanted your hair to feel extra special, but I would not like this conditioner on before going to a gym.

Conclusion: Never will buy this dye again. I don't know how they dispensed this dye without testing out their formula first, or if they did, why they thought this passed the coloring test but I would not recommend this dye.

*UPDATE* It's been a couple of months since I dyed my hair with this. It's been fading rather quickly. Every single day, I've had the dye come out for a month straight. Now, it looks like a nice medium red, but I couldn't wear any color but black for shirts, for a long time. I don't want to go through that again, for these results. I would like my hair to dye how I want it the first time rather than wait a couple of months for somewhat good results.

Where did it all start?

Now that I think about it, I don't know where my hauntings started. I don't know if I had an overactive imagination when I was younger or if I was really scared for a reason. I know that I have an overactive imagination but the hard part is telling what part was real and which ones wasn't when I was younger as I can't remember everything clearly. It almost seems like my mind has always been opened to ghosts...or at least to the thoughts of ghosts. I remember I was always scared at night when I was younger, thinking that something was always there waiting for me outside of my door. I also remember that after I lived in Compton and moved to Riverside, I wasn't as scared of the dark but then I started to be afraid of the backyard, never wanting to look out the windows towards it. It was the reason why I hardly fed my turtle after dark, which is a horrid thought now that I thought about it because I often forgot to feed him before dark. Everytime my mother forced me to go feed him, I'd run like the wind to the garage, gave him his lettuce and hauled ass back. Yeah, I got my cardio in as a child.
I can only vividly remember my hauntings after I moved from Riverside to Nebraska. Oh boy, what a change. From big, ghetto cities (I've always lived in the hood) to a tiny, mostly white town...and to the countryside nonetheless. We moved there due to family already residing there and an available free house in the country house and job. It all seemed like we were hooked up until we found out that it was really scary living in the countryside where the nearest house was a mile away, completely dark at night, and was completely surrounded by cornfields (thank goodness I never watched Children of the Corn...actually still haven't). Me and my sisters were scared because it was so dark and quiet, something we're not used to.
I'm not sure if the haunting in Nebraska started because of this event or if it was just because it took time for the spirit to start acting up. But, all in all, it seemed more because of this event: my stepdad going under the house. Even though we lived in Nebraska, we didn't really have an underground shelter, we had a basement, but it wasn't a full sized one. To get under there, you have to crawl through a small hole, none of my family really wanted to, especially my sister and I, since we're scared of spiders, the only one who really didn't care was my stepdad. I'm also not sure why he decided to go down there but he did one day and brought up all of this old stuff. Lots of old silverware and china, there were more down there besides the silverware and dishes but he didn't bring it up and I didn't dare go down there to see for myself. Now I wish I did since I'm a bigger history buff but back then, I was scared shitless to go down there.
After a couple of months after he ventured down below, my cousins and uncle moved in with us due to a divorce. They were the family that we moved to Nebraska for. I didn't mind though, even if I had to give up my room and share one with my little sister and female cousin (my room was for my two older male cousins and uncle). It was actually really fun living with them, all three of my cousins are cool. My male cousins were funny as hell and my female cousin became my best friend.
Even though my uncle was going through a divorce, his wife still visited us. She would come over to bring over food or hang out. We all loved the food part of course, she was an ok person but she always brought her crybaby son...not a fun little boy. He cried more than my two little sisters combined...he cried because he spilled milk out of his mouth, I don't know about you, but I would laugh at myself, not cry. Anyways, sometimes she would bring food over a bit later into the night.
One night, we heard a knock on the door. My cousin and I were watching TV in the living room, it was pretty late into the night. We heard a knock on the door. Both of us looked at each other. We didn't know what to think at first and then thought...maybe it was my uncle's wife.
"It's really late into the night, why would she be here this late?" We both thought in silence as we looked at each other in fear. Well, if it was her, it would be best if we let her in, so I went to go see if it was. I peeked through the window of the door. I saw no one. Seeing no one scared me, I even looked out towards the front of the house from the window to see if I could see her car. There wasn't any cars out there.
I was a bit creeped out as I turned around.
"Um...no one's there", I said not sure what to make of the situation.
"Are you sure? Did you check to see if a car's there?", my cousin asking to find any type of rationalization.
"Yeah, I checked...no one...I didn't see a car there or any cars driving away." (Forgot to mention that we lived off the main road and can see anyone driving away or to our house for long distances.)
I just sat down back on the couch and continued to watch tv. We both didn't say more about it, I think we were both trying to just forget about the whole thing.
About half an hour to an hour went by since the mysterious knocking.
KNOCK KNOCK.
Oh my god...
We both jumped and looked at each other. It probably about midnight at this point of time. We were both thinking, after realizing the time, that it probably isn't my uncle's wife...but we were both hopeful that it was this time. My cousin went up to check this time, she walked to the door slowly, peeked her head through the window. She looked back at me...the looked on her face told me that no one was there.
"Is it her?" I asked.
"No....no one's there...", she told me.
"Car?"
"No cars..."
"Maybe it's the dogs?" I asked, hopeful that the dogs are awake and were messing around and ended up accidetnally hitting the door.
"They're all asleep," she said as she walked back to the couch.
She sat back down next to me, for the next few minutes, we watched more tv until he heard another KNOCK. This time, we turned off the tv and booked it to our room.

After awhile, we both got used to the knocking late at night as we watched tv. We stopped questioning it and just lived with it, as we're never going to investigate it, nor tell our parents. It happened a few times, mostly during the weekend. What I realized, was that it always happened before a storm. As I mention this, you might think, "Oh, if it's before a storm, it must be the wind picking something up and hitting the door". Well, if the wind can open the door to our porch and curve it to hit our front door twice, then yeah, it could be the wind. I noticed the "storm knocking" after it happened quite a few times, but each storm that we heard knocking, we always had a tornado warning. I'm thinking that it's a good ghost, one that was trying to warn us of a potentially lethal tornado storm. This helped me ease my fear of the knocking. It will still make us jump whe nwe heard it, but we weren't afraid after I realized this. It did scare my cousin when she went to get a drink of water. I asked her if she wanted me to go with her. She declined my offer and decided to go by herself. A minute later, she ran back in the room with a terrified look.
"What happened?" I asked, concerned about what happened.
"I was at the water dispenser and I heard the knocking on the other door." (We had two doors to enter te house, one through the kitchen and one through the living room with a windowed/walled porch with another door to enter the porch to get to the two doors.)
"Oh...uh...did you check to see if anyone was there?" Knowing damn well that no one was, it was around midnight again and if I were her, I'd be too afraid to check by myself.
"No."
"Oh ok, well, let's just pretend that never happened...but next time, I'll go with you."
"Alright, sounds good." I think it was hard for both of us to sleep that night...and this time...there was no storm approaching.

My family only stayed there for awhile, about half a year before moving back to the big city. This time, Vegas. I asked my mom why we were and she said because my parents were tired of the tornadoes. I think the last straw was when we actually saw one outside of town, a bit too close for comfort. If you can see it, you're too close. Even if it was miles and miles away. So we pretty much high-tailed it out there.

I later got in contact with my uncle's family when one of my male cousins decided to move in with us. My stepdad was getting old so he moved in to start a new life and to help out my family. He was really awesome, I loved him because he was the first person that I could feel that I could open up to and depend on. It actually made me cry when I realized this. Being the oldest out of my blood-related siblings, I didn't have anyone to go to or depend on, just little siblings who depended on me. Anyways, he moved in and after awhile, I asked them about when they moved out of the house, why they did, etc. He told me and that's when I had the idea to ask him if he ever experienced anything odd in that house, without telling him of my stories. (Everything that happened to me and my cousin, a.k.a. the knockings, was when we were both up alone, since my male cousins were in high school, they were always out or asleep). He told me a couple of stories that are quite interesting.
One day, he was alone with his girlfriend in the house. His brother went to some party and was gonna stay over there and his dad went somewhere and wasn't going to be back any time soon. My cousin and his girlfriend decided to take pictures. They took it of them with each other and then of each other seperately. Of course, being teens, they decided to take some "naughty" pics...of the girl with her top off. After a few of those pics, they decided to just take pics to send to their friends, to make it sendable to their friends, they took pictures of only their faces. My cousin took a picture of her face, with her face on the side of the frame, rather than have her face in the middle of the frame. After the shot was taken, he looked back at the photo. There was something odd in the picture beside her face in the thumbnail. He clicked on the picture to select it to view it in fullscreen on the camera. There was a face. It was a man's face right next to hers. He showed it to her. They both got creeped out and decided to go somewhere else, leaving that house behind for the day.
We all get up in the middle of the night sometime to go to the bathroom. Well, this one night, my cousin woke up to go to the bathroom. From his room, he turned out to the hallway and walked towards the bathroom. Atthe end of the hallway, is the kitchen...with the kitchen door directly in sight. He looked at the door and realized that he saw a figure in the door window. He thought that he couldn't see things clearly because he was still half asleep. He continued on to the bathroom and after he was done, came out and looked towards the door again. The figure was still there, in the window. Now that he's fully awake. He can see the figure's face. It was a man behind that door. A man that staring back at him. M cousin was frightened and power walked it back to his room (even during this event, his pride forced him to power walk rather than run).
After that incident, some time later, his brother disappeared in the middle of the night. My cousin woke up and saw that his brother wasn't there, asked his dad if he knew where he went and then after realizing that both of them didn't know where he was, they went to go look for him. They only had two vehicles, one was my cousins and the other was my uncles. My cousin's brother would never drive both of their cars unless he got permission from them so they knew that he didn't go anywhere. This was confirmed when they went outside to check their vehicles. He wasn't in the living room watching tv, nor was he in the bathroom. So where was he? When they went outside to check their vehicles, they noticed a small, dim light inside the garage. The garage was closed and they thought it was weird that the light was on. The garage was used for storage rather than for car parking, so this was strange. They opened the garage to check it out. There he was...my cousin's brother. He was sitting in a recliner, just rocking back and forth, with his eyes closed...like he was asleep but was awake enough to rock himself. They called out to him, he didn't react, so my uncle went and shook him. He's tough man, my uncle, I'm surprised he didn't yell at him and smack him. He then woke up and my uncle and cousin asked him what he was doing there. He said he didn't know. He was surprised that he was in there. They all just went back inside and went to sleep. Til this day, we all don't know if he was sleep walking or...what?
As I said before, my uncle is a tough man. You will almost never see him cry. He has a stern, mean look to him. He pretty much looks like he's from the Japanese Yakuza even though he's from Laos. He has his hair slicked back all the time and wears a long, black trench coat. He doesn't look like one of those weird guys that wear trench coats, he actually looks like that he's from the mob. His voice sounds very frightening too, although he is such a kind man to females...females of the family, I'm not sure how he treats females outside of the family. He'll be kind to the males but be really tough to them. When my male cousins were young, they were trained on how to fight and defend themselves, to always be alert. One day my cousins came home from school and as they opened the door, my uncle punched my little cousin in the face (the one who's telling me these stories). After the punch, he said with a stern face, "Always be alert". My god, this was a tough version of the karate kid. So yeah, he's a very tough man. But after all the incidents, he decided, it was time to pray. The last time my uncle ever prayed was when my female cousin was born. He prayed for her be born healthy because his wife at that time, was drinking and maybe doing drugs. She came out completely fine, but after all those years, he's never prayed. I don't know if it was Buddhist prayers or what (they're generally Buddhist but once foreigners come to America, they end up converting to a different religion due to different reasons), but he got my two cousins together and had all three of them pray for quite some time. They were praying to cleanse the house of any spirits or negative/unknown energies. After this, nothing weird ever happened in that house.

After I heard these stories, it just helped me confirm that my female cousin and I weren't imagining things. We weren't the only ones that experienced weird happenings. I never felt any bad energies, I always thought it was a good ghost, since he always liked to warn us of incoming storms. Maybe there was more than one, or maybe my family moving out affected the ghost in some way to where he was getting stronger. Either way, it was really weird and that changed my world.

Maybe I'm Crazy?

My family and I have moved a lot, we've lived in California half of our lives, then to Nebraska, Vegas and Utah. And for some reason, everywhere I move, I seem to always have weird things happen. It might be ghosts or I might just be crazy. Everytime we've moved, my parents get's the biggest room or master bedroom and since I am the oldest, I'd get to choose my room, which is usually the second biggest room.
It makes sense that a bigger room would be colder right? Compared to smaller bedrooms. Well, when I pick my bedrooms, they're usually normal room temperature but once I start to get used to the place and settle in, it's always the coldest room in the house...my paren'ts bigger room was even warmer than mines. I always tried to laugh it off by saying that it's because of my room layout, because it was laid out to where it seemed "spacious" rather than having objects closer together.
Well, I can't laugh it off when weird things start happening. It's only really happened to me, well, I'm the only one that really acknowledged it. My parents are superstitous but their views on ghosts in houses are, "I don't care if there's a ghost in the house. A house is a house. I don't care if it has ghosts or not, I'll live with them. You better be glad we have a place to live." ...yeah, they're pretty hardcore Asians. Truth be told though, I am glad I have a home, that we aren't homeless but dammit...why did the ghosts have to be there? Somewhere inside of me, I feel like as if something is following me but the occurances that happened at each house were completely different. I don't think my sisters have experienced anything or they may have, brushed it off or ignored it. Either way, I didn't want to ask them and get them scared.
I will have to write seperate posts for each of the houses I have experienced weird things with and link them back here.

I'm living on my own now and even though I'm not scared to walk around at night (with the lights on lol), I'm starting to hear noises again. It also doesn't help that I can hear my neighbors walk up and down the stairs or hear them walking in their bathroom (our floors are WAY creeky, creekier than haunted houses I've seen in movies)...or at least I hope it's my neighbors haha I can tell when someone is walking in my townhouse or in my neighbor's, it's my super hearing that helps so I haven't had "anyone" walk around in my hall or up and down my stairs....yet...and hopefully never will. I will admit though, when I hear my neighbors, sometimes it scares the crap out of me. But I have dogs now, so all is good, I have company when my boyfriend goes to work at night.

It's been about about 4 months since I've moved into my townhouse, it's a real nice townhouse if you take out how the previous tenants were gross. (Because of the snow, there was a lot of trash hidden in our backyard, lots of cigarette butts EVERYWHERE, it was literally covering every inch of land. There was also trash everywhere and actual trash bags full of trash...were these neighbors lazy or what? And in addition to that, there were a few problems, broken things and such BUT the kicker is that I had 3 people come over to ask for a previous tenant. Not friends. Oh boy, no, not friends. I think one guy was a "server", the other one...I'm not sure since I didn't see him and the last one was an officer. What did these people do? I'm not sure but I keep getting their old mail and some of the letters are from the District Attorney.

Anyways, I'm starting to hear noises, like someone is at the front door...as if they're standing there thinking or doing something and accidentally hit the door or the rail and then never end up knocking or ringing the doorbell. It's the only place that these mysterious noises are coming from. At first, I thought it was my super hearing, just hearing my neighbors but then I can tell which ones are right infront of my door or farther than that. Either way, it's not ok, if it's a real person, then I don't get why they're there and if not, then dammit, why do I keep moving somewhere that has problems.

I'm starting to think that I'm either crazy or a magnet to haunted places.

How to Change Icon Text Colors in Windows 7

Today, I noticed that my icon text color sucks with my new desktop background (which is super awesome because it's a bg of most of the super women heroines), so I went into the "Personalize" window and of course, it's not so easy to find where to change the icon text color. After a couple of Google searches, I finally figured out how to do it. People have suggested downloading softwares or doing other long or complicated processes, but I'm a sinple person and like to do EVERYTHING the easy way if possible and I always try avoiding downloading softwares for something so small.
The horrible, cold, hard, annoying truth about why the hell it's so hard to solve this super small issue:
Windows 7 is designed to change the icon text color to best fit the image or color background AUTOMATICALLY, it's designed to be smart enough to perform this process for us but with multi-colored images, it's a bit on the confused, dumb side. And because of this futuristic, hidden process, it's a bit more work to change the icon text color.
After reading some posts on this issue and some solutions, I just went to go do my own troubleshooting with bits and pieces from other people's fixes.

Here's my SUPER DUPER EASY WAY of how to change your icon text color:

1. Right-click on your desktop background and choose the "Personalize" option.

2. Go to "Desktop Background".

3. In that window, choose "Change Background Color" in the lower-left hand corner.

4. Depending on what color you want your text (either white or black), choose the opposite. So if you want white text, choose black. If you want black, choose white. The only options for the icon text color is white or black, sorry no cool colors for us, the fancier we want our interface to look, the less options we have of changing (ironic but I guess this is how the future will be). After choosing a color, you will see a preview of the font color of the icon name change.

5. Click "Save Changes". Choosing a background color will NOT change your desktop IMAGE, only the color behind the image.

It really wasn't so painful to do this but was much more painful to do the research, not as bad as other things I had to figure out but enough that when compared to the actual process, it's just kind of ridiculous, especially when I got a lot of "download this software" answers (my arch nemesis of answers).

**Note: This only works if your drop shadow is removed from the icon text titles. To remove the shadows from text, go to Control Panel and type in "performance" in the search box. Then click "Use tools to improve performance". In that window, select "Adjust visual effects" on the left-hand side. Once that window pops up, you should see a box where you can scroll down, scroll all the way down and deselect "Use drop shadows for icon labels on the Desktop", then click OK.**