I live in Bangkok, Thailand and finding a hairstylist who A. can communicate well enough in English to have a proper hair conversation and B. has experience with Caucasian hair is a bit of a rare find. I found someone who fit the bill on both counts and I went yesterday for a full head highlight/balayage with a very specific ask.

**The starting point**: my hair had been grown out with full head highlights for about seven months (I'm six months postpartum). It's very golden, very warm, definitely needed a touch up.

**The ask:** I wanted an all over golden-bronde color, no chunky highlights, no bold money piece, very soft root shadow. I wanted to diffuse any of the chunky highlights that I had and to get an overall more even golden blonde.

I sat in the chair for over seven hours and it wasn't until the stylist was about to blow dry my hair that I pointed out some very obvious orange hot roots. The stylist agreed and put some sort of dark color on my roots again in attempts to blend. While it definitely helped, there's still quite a bit of orange at the roots and around my hairline. It's stripey, it's patchy, and I'm really unhappy with it.

The stylist mentioned that it was no problem, I could come back and she would touch up the roots again but before I do I'd like to get a few more professional opinions on the best course of action here:

\- Do these areas need to be lightened again to get the orange out?

\- Is it better to just put a dark color to blend?

Overall I'm unhappy with the general tone of the color because I asked for warm honey blonde and instead she gave me more of a cool neutral. I think the only part of the whole thing that really rubbed me the wrong way was when the stylist said, "Everybody wants this neutral blonde color. You should be happy with it." Well it's not what I asked for. I wanted warm. I've had my hair lightened plenty of times before. I know that cool toner will wash out fairly quickly so I'm less concerned about that.

My bigger question is how to handle this hot root situation. Should I go back to the same stylist? Is this a marker of an experience or was it just bad luck? Before I double down more on the same stylist, I'd like to have a solid plan. 

I'm attaching some photos here for reference: my before hair, the inspo pics, and the after pics. Please help, is it as bad as I think it is? 

Highlight fail / Hot Roots Solutions?