walnut 'husks' as hair dye????

I've recently been taking the outer case (husk???) off of our walnuts and didn't realise soon enough how they stain!!!  My hands are yucky brown/black stained now and it ain't comin off  ops: Does anyone know if you could make hair dye - or wool dye when we get our sheep?

Well, I found this....

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One of the most popular ways to darken hair is with walnut dye. Be warned, walnut dye will stain flesh quickly, and severely. It is next to impossible to get rid of walnut dye. When dying your hair, if you get the dye on your forehead, face, or neck, you will have to walk around with that for many days before it starts to fade.

With that said, here's a method to naturally darken your hair with walnuts.

Step 1: Obtain some walnuts.

Black walnuts, green walnuts, 'normal' snack walnuts: each has a slightly different shade. Most people say to use black walnuts, but I had an interesting experience with normal, bought-in-a-bag walnuts. They were shelled, and ready to be eaten. I threw some in a cup of water and let it sit for 4 days. At the end of the 4 days, the water had turned black with the dye. This is the dye I use. However, for quicker dye, buy a few black walnuts, crack each, and place the entire walnut into some boiling water. Boil for approx. 15 - 25 minutes.

Step 2: Once the water is dark, strain it several times to remove the pieces of walnuts and shells in the water. Be very careful not to spill this water! It will absolute stain every single object it touches, including skin. It cannot be removed from clothing, etc. It will take several days to fade from the skin.

Step 3: Remove as much clothing as you can, or put on old clothing you do not care about. Cover your work area in towels; work over a hard wood/tile/linoleum floor, not over carpet.
If the walnut dye gets on your skin, it will stain. Because nobody wants to walk around with a darkened forehead/face, it is important to avoid getting the dye on your flesh. This is next to impossible. Because of this, I suggest placing masking/paper tape over your forehead. Once you
have placed the tape on your forehead, rub the top of the tape with a liberal amount of petroleum jelly. This should cause any dye to hit the tape and roll off, instead of soaking into the tape and staining the skin.

Wear latex gloves. Cover any exposed flesh in a very liberal amount of petroleum jelly. This will cause any way-ward dye to roll off, instead of staining the flesh.

Step 4: Apply dye evenly to the hair. You can either use your fingers to spread it through your hair, or you can use a brush, such as the ones that come with a commercial hair coloring kit.

Step 5: Place a hair cap over hair, and let it rest for about 30 minutes. Longer if necessary, but don't let the hair dry with the dye on it. Be sure to monitor the hair so that it doesn't become too dark.

Step 6: Once the dye has sat for an extended period of time, remove the shower cap, bend over so that the hair is hanging downwards, and spray/rinse off. Do not just hop into the shower. The dye will run out of the hair and onto your flesh, staining your skin a darker shade.

Once the dye is rinsed, wash hair with shampoo and blow dry. Once it is dry, you will be able to see the final coloring. If it is not dark enough, repeat above process as often as necessary.

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And I would add..... Have someone assist you This sounds precarious - LOL

~Jami

Oh I laughed reading that. Oh YES it stains and I reckon my thumb nail (used for piercing said husk) will take a LOT longer than a few days to come clean.  I wore latex gloves - obviously with small pinprick hole  ops: ops: ops:

Can't wait to plaster myself in tape and smear on petroleum jelly  My dh will think his luck's in 

might be a real pain waiting 12 months for a touch up job..

reason my hair is natural

I've never heard this before! Very interesting.

I don't use it for my hair but I often use walnut husks to dye our Angora goats' yarn. Just boil up the husks until the dark mix stains then strain the husks out in a cloth. I filled this pot up too full - I know...



It's a lovely rich dye which doesn't need a chemical mordant and as heninfrance knows  it doesn't wash out easily! It leaves the wool very soft and shiny. I like dying with it because when the first almost black dyebath is exhausted you can add some more water and get anything from a soft brown to a lovely oaty colour.



Here's a mottled Angora sweater I made by dipping the wool gradually into the dyebath. (My OH didn't like having his photo taken  !)



You can buy the ready made mixture cheaply in France, it's used for staining wood, tanning hides and colouring basket making reeds.

it sure produces a beautiful rich color in the yarn! I wish I had the patience for knitting and such. i think that is something i will always have to barter or buy. my grandmother would be so dissapointed in me.

wow that yarn is beautiful..i love deep dark browns..brown is my favorite color i wear it every day ! I also grow reeds and have thought about doing baskets..it probably would dye wood too.

i have a baby black walnut tree growing..so i'll try to remember all this..as it will take years for me to get the nuts..but by then..i'll probably be interested in doing quiet older person crafty things..

Wow...that is so cool, HWH! Really glad you posted some pix! I guess I need to fly to France & have you color my hair, just for fun! Now that would be an expensive dye job! Definitely worth the trip though. Going to Europe is on my bucket list!

Brenda Groth wrote:
..i love deep dark browns..

me too! my dh teases me about always wearing browns and greens. I like brown and green it reminds me of my garden.

There are lots of old stories in England about gypsies stealing your children. I suppose all thefts were put down to gypsies, poor things. Though like as not they were guilty of some of them the very poor are forced in to positions that land them up in jail, that worsen their bad situation, forced  by there extreme need, i am a fan of Charley Chaplain philosophy on immigrant workers and other disadvantaged groups. I don't believe in reducing the pity people have for these by mentioning the occasional crime so heinous as to make all excuses for crime seem invalid. The gypsies it was said, said that they could earn more with blond children begging than with dark haired children begging. When they had just stolen them they died their faces with walnut juice so that people looking for the lost child would not imagine this dark faced child could be the one they were looking for.
    As anything gypsy was intensely romantic to us children by us i mean my brothers and sisters and me, i have always wanted to dye my face with walnut juice and ended up doing it this summer i debated between getting a stripped face or not and ended up trying it with fresh walnuts skins and luckily not getting a stripped face, it hardly worked at all but it stung my eyes a lot. It was a very crazy thing to do at fifty five but somehow i just ended up doing it.
    The dark coloured furniture dye here in Spain is called nogaline, nogal being the word for walnut here it leaves furniture a rich brown colour.
  I read of using walnuts to polish funiture with, rub the meat of the nut on your furniture it has lots of oils in it. I tried it but i don't think it did anything for the small shelf i tried it on, maybe you have to give it several coats. I will try again now i have remembered it.
  I once tried making pastry with walnuts and just a bit of flour to stick them together, crushed walnuts, it came out really well so they have enough oil in them to make good pastry. agri rose macaskie.

rose macaskie wrote:
It was a very crazy thing to do at fifty five but somehow i just ended up doing it.
     

not too crazy. I have always had a secret desire to use henna for body art. or....maybe we are both crazy.

Irene, you have such a talent.  Tell your OH your sweater makes him look real good 

All that work.... I hope to try felting one day, forget spinning and knitting, and I will remember your lovely browns achieved with walnuts.

It's not a lot of work really and it's good fun. I don't knit by hand, I use a manual machine and do the finishing by hand.

I was talking about felting with one of our woofers today (I'm teaching her to knit) and showed her some of the things that had been made from felting our wool. Unfortunately, I haven't got a lot of time to do felting and experimentation at the moment but that will come.

Our vet asked for some fleece for his daughter who is at college and the class made loads of things from the goats' wool. They gave me a CD with the photos, gorgeous stuff !

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hardworkinghippy/sets/72157594406966433/

I love the story about the walnut gypsy faces Rose. 

Great pictures.  They are all so creative.  I'd love to take a class like that.

Beautiful colors from the dye!  I need to color my gray and am allergic to chemicals-so tired of the itchy rash they cause after a salon dye job.  I wonder if it's okay to use if you already have henna on your hair?

Different hair dyes sometimes interact with each other to make an unexpected new colour, like I've heard that trying to bleach off henna can create a bright green colour. So I would recommend you make up a batch of walnut dye and then test it on one strip of hair. Then if you like it go forward with the plan...

May I confirm that it’s the store-bought-ready-to-eat walnut kernel that you put into the cup of water which after some time turned black? I thought it would have to be at least the hard outer hard shell and not the edible bits. I know green ones do stain, just like any green pods etc but I wud be grateful to know your side of things

when dying your hair with walnut, how long does it stay colored? And is there a way to "remove" it again? With natural ingridients

Regarding walnut dyes and most especially, skin.
This is for Rose and her Gypsy heart from fourteen years ago.
Messing around with a girlfriend about thirty-eight years ago, we had also read about the skin staining of walnuts and purchased a natural extract made from the green unripe husks (that form •around• the eventual hard shell), funnily enough, this extract smelled a lot like self-tanner (usually comprised of dehydroacetic? something, I think the acronym is DHA, can't recall the chemical makeup plus erythulose, which is derived from a sugar alcohol called erythritol and which lays down a nice dark base that unfortunately does not provide any Sun Protection Factor).
For some unknown reason, the juglone in the walnut extract and one of the above ingredients or the combo thereof, smells close to identical and works not just as a skin dye, but as a 'tanning accelerant', so the more sunlight one gets, the darker one gets (and the fragrance really doesn't dissipate, no matter how many showers you take, it's very similar, the scent is, to blackstrap molasses).
This skin-stain, plus the subsequent tanning acceleration, at least on our exposed skin, lasted quite some time, especially the tanning effect.
We did not get any in our hair, however, I had close to blonde brows when I started out, which were darker by a great factor when I was done. Much darker than my very dark skin, if I had intended on dyeing them, I imagine they would have looked more natural.
I think there are some pH tricks one can achieve with the raw material of the unripe green husks of the walnut. (These are kind of soft, but not squishy, around the size of a small plum, a beautiful almost olive or Army green colour and they pretty easily can be peeled off of the rest of the walnut, however, when you are making an extract, you don't have to separate the nut and shell from the outer rind, you just put the whole shebang, after bruising it well,  into your maceration vessel (which definitely should be either dark glass or clear glass but covered with a sleeve (I usually use a nylon stocking or dismembered tights for better opacity; if you leave the foot on the sock, then you will have your first straining sock ready to go after macerating it for around 6 weeks, agitating vigorously every other day, then when the time comes, you can use your half-tights-sock to line a canning funnel and pour your marc and solvents through, then secondarily, you would filter your solution through unbleached coffee filter paper, for any detritus or precipitate.))
The solvent mixture recommendation from Stephen Buhner only lists the dried hull at 1:5, 50% alcohol, so I am going to assume that fresh hulls would be extracted at a ratio of 1 part crude drug to 2 parts solvent, said solvent being at least 50% food-grade ethanol, the remaining fifty percent being preferably boiled deionized water or at the least, distilled water, no minerals!
The recommended dose for the dried 1:5 extract is '20-50 drops, up to 4x/daily' or 1-2.5 milliliters, up to 4x per day, with or without food, probably sublingually.
Keep in mind that Black Walnut, in all its bits, is a powerful anti-fungal,  and  I think it is anti-candida and possibly anti-candidiasis, and if I remember correctly, a vermifuge, which as I am sure you know, means either parasite-killer or parasite-expeller ( and which might work as both).
I can't recall any other uses at the moment but I will leave you with one last little bit of trivia regarding the black walnut tree and it is Allelopathic in nature.
Which means how the tree itself interacts with the rest of your garden/forest/orchard/compost pile..
Juglans Major DOES NOT play well with others!
This means don't plant •anything• you want to live, including other walnut trees! Anywhere under it's canopy or within rooting distance!
The black walnut tree spreads an anti-rooting hormone far and wide, along with a host of other chemicals that work on all stages of plants, whether they are germinating or fully established. This tree will kill everything within spitting distance and will even poison your compost for a solid six months if you spread it on your garden. If I remember correctly, I don't think you even want to burn it and spread the ashes because that is also toxic, I think, but check on that last one.
I think that's everything I know on the subject of Walnuts.

'Once you know the way broadly, you can see it in all things' -Book of Five Rings

Suki Marmelaide wrote:
Regarding walnut dyes and most especially, skin.
This is for Rose and her Gypsy heart from fourteen years ago.
Messing around with a girlfriend about thirty-eight years ago, we had also read about the skin staining of walnuts and purchased a natural extract made from the green unripe husks (that form •around• the eventual hard shell), funnily enough, this extract smelled a lot like self-tanner (usually comprised of dehydroacetic? something, I think the acronym is DHA, can't recall the chemical makeup plus erythulose, which is derived from a sugar alcohol called erythritol and which lays down a nice dark base that unfortunately does not provide any Sun Protection Factor).
For some unknown reason, the juglone in the walnut extract and one of the above ingredients or the combo thereof, smells close to identical and works not just as a skin dye, but as a 'tanning accelerant', so the more sunlight one gets, the darker one gets (and the fragrance really doesn't dissipate, no matter how many showers you take, it's very similar, the scent is, to blackstrap molasses).
This skin-stain, plus the subsequent tanning acceleration, at least on our exposed skin, lasted quite some time, especially the tanning effect.
We did not get any in our hair, however, I had close to blonde brows when I started out, which were darker by a great factor when I was done. Much darker than my very dark skin, if I had intended on dyeing them, I imagine they would have looked more natural.
I think there are some pH tricks one can achieve with the raw material of the unripe green husks of the walnut. (These are kind of soft, but not squishy, around the size of a small plum, a beautiful almost olive or Army green colour and they pretty easily can be peeled off of the rest of the walnut, however, when you are making an extract, you don't have to separate the nut and shell from the outer rind, you just put the whole shebang, after bruising it well,  into your maceration vessel (which definitely should be either dark glass or clear glass but covered with a sleeve (I usually use a nylon stocking or dismembered tights for better opacity; if you leave the foot on the sock, then you will have your first straining sock ready to go after macerating it for around 6 weeks, agitating vigorously every other day, then when the time comes, you can use your half-tights-sock to line a canning funnel and pour your marc and solvents through, then secondarily, you would filter your solution through unbleached coffee filter paper, for any detritus or precipitate.))
The solvent mixture recommendation from Stephen Buhner only lists the dried hull at 1:5, 50% alcohol, so I am going to assume that fresh hulls would be extracted at a ratio of 1 part crude drug to 2 parts solvent, said solvent being at least 50% food-grade ethanol, the remaining fifty percent being preferably boiled deionized water or at the least, distilled water, no minerals!
The recommended dose for the dried 1:5 extract is '20-50 drops, up to 4x/daily' or 1-2.5 milliliters, up to 4x per day, with or without food, probably sublingually.
Keep in mind that Black Walnut, in all its bits, is a powerful anti-fungal,  and  I think it is anti-candida and possibly anti-candidiasis, and if I remember correctly, a vermifuge, which as I am sure you know, means either parasite-killer or parasite-expeller ( and which might work as both).
I can't recall any other uses at the moment but I will leave you with one last little bit of trivia regarding the black walnut tree and it is Allelopathic in nature.
Which means how the tree itself interacts with the rest of your garden/forest/orchard/compost pile..
Juglans Major DOES NOT play well with others!
This means don't plant •anything• you want to live, including other walnut trees! Anywhere under it's canopy or within rooting distance!
The black walnut tree spreads an anti-rooting hormone far and wide, along with a host of other chemicals that work on all stages of plants, whether they are germinating or fully established. This tree will kill everything within spitting distance and will even poison your compost for a solid six months if you spread it on your garden. If I remember correctly, I don't think you even want to burn it and spread the ashes because that is also toxic, I think, but check on that last one.
I think that's everything I know on the subject of Walnuts.