How to Fix Bad Hair Color.(hair color)

Have you ever gone to the store and bought hair color? You walk up and down the isle looking for that one color. Boom! There it is Chestnut Brown. You see the sparkle of the golden color reflect off the store lights. You think to yourself, "What a perfect color!" as you add the box to your cart filled with tissue paper, canned veggies and that evening's dinner. You get home and set the box on the kitchen table. You start preparing dinner as you keep eyeing that box imagining this beautiful color on your hair.

After dinner you grab your box excitedly and run upstairs. You pull out the directions and the color bottles. You start to read, "Mix bottle A with bottle B, shake and apply. Then wait 45 minutes and rinse". Okay, easy enough. You get all the color applied and you sit there patiently waiting. You look down at your watch, 10 minutes have past, "Only another 35 more" you think to yourself as you get up to clean a little. Finally, the time has come to rinse out the color. You take your shower, dry your hair and look up in the mirror. The expression on your face is as if you have seen a train derail into a lake. Shear panic hits as the warm chestnut brown you imagined was a dirty brown with a tint of seaweed green. You couldn't imagine walking outside looking like this. All these thought's hit you, "How do I fix this?"... "What do I do?"... "I look horrible!" as you grab your head and take a seat.

Has this ever happened to you? You end up spending more on getting it fixed by a professional then you would have going to one in the first place. So let me help you understand why this happens and how to fix the problem before it starts.

The lady in the story had blond hair. Dependent on your hair color you have different fillers under that color. You have stages of yellow, orange and red. If you are blond you have yellowish fillers in your hair, if you are dark brunette you have reddish fillers. So let's say you go from blond to brunette, you have to put red back into the hair first to get that nice brown. This does not mean go buy a bright red color and put it on your hair. But if you see that beautiful chestnut brown color, look at the color and you will see those golden tones. The gold you see is not enough warmth to put back into the hair as the blond will pull the ash tone from it (the green tone). You will need to look for a box that is a warmer brown, a red brown perhaps. Look for a picture that has a red toned brown instead of a golden or warm brown.

The blond will suck this red up and create a nice brown color for you. This is used for dramatic changes such as going from a level 9 (light blond) to a level 5 (medium brown). Levels range from 14+ which is bleach blond to a level 1 which is black. My suggestion is stick closer to the color you have so that you only have to incorporate a little extra filler to none verses a lot of color filler. Also if you are bleaching from brown to blond (not recommended) you will need a strong enough bleach to pull out those fillers. If you have ever bleached and have gotten that orange blond it's because it did pull out the brown but was not strong enough to cut through that filler. So my suggestion is if you have to bleach by yourself get another color to cover it incase. If you are a medium brown and bleaching buy an ashy light blond color to help cover any problems that arise. The best advice I can give is if you are going from blond to brown make sure to refill with reddish tones (very warm tones) as blond tends to pull ash (very cool tones). If you are going from brown to blond get colors that are ashy (cool in tone) as bleaching will create warm tones and you need to cancel those warm tones out by using very ash colors.

Warm colors: Yellow (Gold), Orange (Copper), Red

Ash colors: Blue, Green, Grey, Purple

Note: Use the cancellation color to get rid of the color you don't want. Red and Green cancel each other out. Blue and Orange cancel each other out. Purple and Yellow cancel each other out. You need to be careful using purple on yellow. If you are blond and you have light yellow undertones you need a purple toner but you cannot leave on too long as it will pull purple or grey.