I tried home dying my hair and it has gone wrong, please help!

Hi,

I’m a natural very light blonde and recently wanted to go brown. I stupidly put a box brown hair colour on it which it hardly took. I then put an even darker chocolate brown onto it and still it didn’t take, so I then used one of them new box products that takes your hair back to its natural colour in one hour, which worked but I wasn’t happy being back to light blonde.

I then put LIVE platinum blonde onto my hair as I wanted it to be mega white, but it’s made my hair look a yellowish colour! I’m really unhappy at the moment as I’m 30 and this is the first time I have ever dyed my hair.

Please help me! How do I get it whiter, and also when I do want try brown next time is it true that I should put a red on first and then a brown? How long does the red have to be on before I can then put the brown on?

Many thanks,

Anon, UK

I think you need to assess the condition of your hair first before attempting another colour change. Hair can only withstand so much colouring before it says enough is enough. If it is fine and is feeling healthy then you should be able to get it lighter without too much problem. What you need to do is bleach the hair to a very pale yellow and then tone it with a pale cool ash shade to achieve that white hue.

A word of warning though, if you want to go darker in the future it may be difficult for the colour to take because you have removed all the natural pigment. Porous hair often loses pigment very quickly (think of it like a sponge with big holes in it) so if you want to colour it darker I would think twice about going for white blonde.

Taking blonde (natural) to dark you don't need to add warm tones, but you normally have to use a permanent colour because it has the strength to add all that pigment into the hair. If the hair is blonde (artificially) then you add warm tones to make sure that the hair doesn't go flat or khaki green.

John Clark at Brooks+Brooks, London