Katie Piper used food colouring to dye her hair when she was younger.
The 37-year-old television presenter loved to experiment with her locks when she was a youngster, but she didn't have access to hair dyes and would use vibrant colour additives to switch up her blonde hair.
Katie exclusively told BANG Showbiz: "I was quite adventurous because my mum and dad didn’t supply me with the tools. I used to get food colouring from the kitchen and dye my hair blue, green, red. And I used to get my mum’s fabric scissors that are the jagged, zig-zag scissors and try to cut my hair.
"There are some really terrible pictures of me. My dad was the barber so he would give us horrific haircuts. Looking back now, I used to think they were terrible, blunt haircuts but now they’re probably really Shoreditch and cool. They weren’t edgy in the 80s."
The model suffered life-changing burns in an acid attack in March 2008, and has since undergone hundreds of operations since, and she used her hair to express herself while she was in recovery and is insistent on keeping her tresses healthy.
Although she did resort back to her old ways by taking a pair of scissors to her locks in lockdown.
She said: of her DIY cut: "I actually did cut my hair, so I’m a bit too ashamed to go to the hairdressers. I’d been on a Zoom call and you look at yourself for long. I was like, ‘My ends have actually needed a cut. It’s been a long time’, and I came off the Zoom call, pulled my hair forward and snipped the ends. It’s not one of my top tips!"
Katie is encouraging others to take proper care of their hair in lockdown by using Pantene's Silky & Glowing range in between trips to the hairdressers, as it has kept her hair strong and shiny.
She added: "I was terrible with my hair so perhaps if I had known or if you are insisting on bleaching your hair at such a young age, please use hair masks, please use rescue shots. That would have been a better thing [for my hair]. This range is so good because it restores and revives that colour and when you do it at home, it means you don’t have to have as many salon visits or colour top-ups. So leaving longer between your colour, because you’re using the right haircare range, is another way to give your hair a bit of a break."
Katie was speaking as research commissioned by Pantene to celebrate the launch of the Silky & Glowing range found that almost half of Brits start their bleached hair journey as young as 16-20 and 1 in 5 start as young as 11-15 years old.
Pantene's Silky & Glowing range is available now exclusively in Superdrug and via www.superdrug.com.
