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Color Correction project
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"Before" Photo by Shari Geldrich
Some time ago my sister called me to ask what her 13 year old daughter could use to turn her medium brown hair black. My suggestion was to not do it. “First, I’m not as familiar with over-the-counter color products as I am with professional ones, so I’m not even sure what to tell you to use. But the thing is, no matter what she uses, if she gets tired of it and wants to change it (and she will) it will be a big project that you won’t be able to do at home. You’ll have to go to a salon to have it fixed, and it will be expensive.”
Of course, my niece colored her hair black anyway. No problem. A few months passed, and my sister called again. My niece decided she no longer wanted her hair to be black, but wanted red instead. She had about 3” of new growth, and applied a bright red color over everything. The result? A very unhappy 13 year old with mostly-black hair, and a bright red stripe down the center of her head. I said I’d fix it when I came to visit, which was this past weekend.
The process. Photo by Zoey Cuccaro
The most important thing to understand, if you’re coloring your hair at home, is color does not work over color.
Think of dying fabric. Let’s say you start with a piece of white fabric and dye it, say, beige. Now, let’s say you’re tired of the beige and you want to make it a darker brown, so you dye it again. So far so good, right? You’ve got a nice piece of brown fabric. But now you decide that you don’t want the brown any more, you want a lighter color again- maybe a pastel yellow. What will happen to that brown fabric if you put a yellow dye over it? Not much. The only way you’ll get anything close to a yellow again is if you bleach it first. Remove the existing pigment, and start over.
Ok, that’s a sort-of-rough analogy, but basically the same thing holds true with hair. Any color you put on your hair means that any other color, unless it’s darker, will not have any effect. You can keep making the hair darker but to lighten it, the pigment has to be removed, usually with a bleach or color remover of some sort. The problem comes in when there’s new growth, because that hair will respond to color. The result will be that all the new hair will retain the new color, and the previously colored hair will either stay the same or “grab” part of the new color and possibly turn darker or off-tone.
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"After" photo by Shari Geldrich
This was the situation with my niece’s hair. When I arrived, most of her long, wavy hair was very dark. There was a 3” band of red near the top (which had faded some since she first did it) and then another inch or so of new growth. The challenge was to create a uniform color closer to her natural color so that it could grow out without being obvious.
The first step was to remove the darkest pigment from the mid-length to the ends. I used a mild lightener to do this. After the darkest color had started to lighten, I then applied the lightener to the part of the hair that had been colored red. When the hair was a uniform, lighter color, the lightener was removed and the final color was applied. I used a permanent color close to her natural color on the new growth, and a protein-rich, super-conditioning demi-permanent color in the same shade on the rest of her hair. The demi permanent color will produce long-lasting results with less damage, which is important for hair that’s been through multiple processes.
The end result, after a good trim with about 6” of length cut off- gorgeous!
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