I'm glad I did. I forgot how much I like the texture it gives my hair, and how shiny it looks. Plus, the red is just bright and awesome. Henna adds a natural redhead cast to the existing color of hair, so I've got a medium auburn. Someone with darker hair ends up with mahogany, and any grays become strawberry-blonde highlights.
It's not a "Nice and Easy" project. Henna makes hair red, but it is an olive-drab green powder. We mix it with lemon juice and oil and some tea and spices and let it sit for several hours to develop the dye. This makes a really gross green/brown paste with tiny strawy chunks from the spices and tea. Being a country girl and raised on a farm, I can authoritatively inform you that it looks EXACTLY like cow manure.
Henna alone has a very strong smell like alfalfa hay, which also, I've been told, smells much like pot. To me, it also smells sort of like vegetal, like carrots or pumpkins, but in a more obnoxious way. We add ginger and cinnamon and cloves, so it mostly smells like gingerbread instead.
So, when the paste is mixed and aged, we get together in our oldest and rattiest stretchy pants and shirts and trowel piles of the glop all over our hair. The buddy system makes this easier. Even with help, I always get earsfull of the junk. EWWWWW. After application, we wait 1-2 hours. Also a bit gross, since even though we wrap our heads with grocery bags, the mix weeps poo juice out the edges the whole time.
Break for snacks: We always make crepes when we have a henna party. Yum! We had ham and cheese and chives crepes for lunch, then chocolate and banana for dessert. We also shared the joys of Nutella with two friends.
We rinse and shampoo for about five minutes over Lucy's kitchen sink, then stagger about dizzily while everyone compliments us. It's the best when the hair dries and it's sunny outside, then everyone has a gorgeous gleaming copper head of hair.
A picture, since it wasn't sunny outside:
