Hair Help: I Look Like a Clown

Factual Questions
1

A few days ago I got the urge to dye my hair :smack: and the result is something about two shades away from Ronald McDonald (i.e, bright, pinkish-red). The original dye job was done by moi, at home, and I have since tried to correct this mistake with a different color dye (this time the plainest brown color I could find) to no avail. My hair did not change color AT ALL during the second dye attempt.

I’m wondering if anyone here could tell me how I can correct this horrid red color myself, and get my hair back to looking more natural and a little less wig-like? Please? Before I start crying.

Thanks a million.

2

A couple of questions:

What product was the first dye?
What product was the second dye?
Did the colour tone down at all with the second application?

3

Both dyes were Herbal Essence brand. With the second attempt, it seemed to come out slightly darker, but no less red. People are still turning their heads at the girl with wild red hair when I venture out into public. :wink:

I’m thinking that I have three options:

  1. go dark dark dark. (I don’t want to do this as I hate black hair on myself as much as I hate bright red)

  2. wait for it to fade over the course of a couple weeks and try the plain brown color again (and repeat the wait/dye process as many times as necessary)

  3. pay a professional $100+ to correct it (ouch, can’t afford that)

4

The great thing about modern hairdos is the worse you look, the better you look.

If you really look bad, then your friends will think to spend a lot of time and money to get that way.:smiley:

5

My suggestion is to go to a local beauty supply shop and ask for a product that will assist in washing out/fading your hair color. I believe Paul Mitchell has a product called “Shampoo 3” (and you can buy it’s generic at the supply store too) that does this. I’m having trouble remembering the name of the particular ingredient you’ll need - sorry (tea tree oil???). Good luck though!!

:smiley:

6

Reds fade faster than any other hair color, and all hair color fades for the first few days (noticeably, at least to me.) You can just wash it a lot for the first few days to see if it fades a little and you get used to it. I’ve also heard that soaking it in oil for long periods of time (saturate it with vegetable oil) helps, but I can’t promise anything since I’ve never tried.

I’ve never used that brand, but I’m surprised a dye on top of it didn’t help. Usually, dyed hair is more porous, meaning it’s more inclined to soak up color. But wait a couple days and try another brand, in case Herbal Essence browns are duds. Go with a brown a little lighter than you intend to end up, because the colors on home dye kits almost always come out darker than the box. And expect it to still have noticeable red tones - but then, auburn is a very attractive hair color.

7

I agree on trying to dye again in a couple of days, but be sure your brown dye has the word “neutral” or “ash” in its color description. If it says “golden” that means it adds red tones, the opposite of what you want.

Another possibility: try going to an ash/platinum blonde shade. (Again, avoid ‘warm’ and ‘golden’ in the description.) This should be a two step process, the first of which is bleaching out the current color. With any luck, all the red will go. Then you can re-dye to whatever you prefer …or stay blonde. Summer’s coming, after all!

8

Dawn dishwashing liquid.
You read me right. Dawn Dishwashing liquid.
Tide works well, too. Wash your hair in it twice a day.
Then re-color with color from a beauty supply store. The employees should be able to tell you how to use it.

Those colors are usually much more true to tone than box colors.

9

This is possible only if she goes to a beauty supply store and buys the stuff there. Unfortunately there are no instructions on the bottles you get in those stores.

Most hair dyes you find in regular drugstores are NOT two tone processes. I once bought a light “ash” blond color and my hair turned out the same as the OP, it was a bright pinkish red. I started with light brown hair, my natural color. Needless to say I was mortified. This was a product with an oxidizer or peroxide in a one step process. The problem is, that the reds in your hair linger unless you completely bleach it to almost white. So most people won’t get the result shown on the box of a one step process if they are going lighter, only if they are going darker.

The OP doesn’t say if the color was a “tint” (with no bleach) or the type I just desribed. She also doesn’t say what color she was aiming for.

If it was a semi-permanent color, it’ll wash out eventually. If it was a one-step lightening color, her hair will remain red (won’t wash out) until she

a) bleaches it out completely
b) covers it with a darker color. This really should have worked, maybe try a different, darker product and leave it on longer. I would use the bleachless tint, you know, the kind that “covers gray”.

10

I was, in fact, aiming for auburn, but after this experience I think I’ve become jaded and no longer want anything at all to do with the color red. The dye was permanent, but no bleach in it. It was just a medium red color that looked very innocent on the box. Thanks for the tips - I’m afraid Dawn would dry out my hair completely, no? I will try using a (lighter than I want) ash brown just as soon as I think my poor hair is up for another round.

11

That is good news! If there is no bleach (are you sure about that, most permanent colors have bleach in them) the color will eventually wash out in about two weeks. If you want to cover it with another color, you will have to go darker, I’m afraid.

There’s no such thing as a soap “drying out” your hair since hair is not alive and doesn’t contain any water - I think Dawn is probably safe to use, but I doubt it will do much good.

As an aside - hair dye makers put bleach into their permanent colors because it makes the hair shaft expand and “catch” the dye. Even so, these colors will eventually fade and wash out. The problem is, the bleach will have changed your underlying real hair color to something lighter and redder if you’re not blond already. So keep this in mind when you go looking for any other colors marked “permanent”. The fact that you said “pinkish” makes me suspect that your hair was bleached… unless you started out as a blonde?

12

I’m going to second the Dawn dishsoap suggestion myself. (you can find more on all this from a thread a few months ago:HAIR CRISIS)

Good luck!

13

Hmm…perhaps it did have bleach then. Here’s a page that has a little bit of info about the product: http://www.clairol.com/brand/herbalessences/whytic.jsp

I didn’t save the box so I can’t check the ingredients. I do know that it was Herbal Essences #45, “Brilliant Sienna Auburn” (or something close to that) and the second dye I used was #60, “Bronze Ice- Medium Golden Brown” (the “golden” was where I went wrong, I’m guessing).

14

Oh, and no, I didn’t start out as a blonde. I did have layers of color on my hair already though. It had been about 3 months since I last dyed it and it was a medium brown. My natural color is dark brown although I have not had my natural color - naturally - in about 8 years.

Again, that product could have had bleach, but I should note that although my hair is naturally dark brown without any noticeable red (one Slavic parent), it does have a tendency to “grab” red when processed (one Irish parent).

15

Sorry to serial post, but I just wanted to add that I spoke to one of the “consultants” at the Clairol “hotline” and their advice was to wait another four weeks before applying anything else. FOUR WEEKS!

SIGH

16

Try www.clairol.com they have all kinds of hints and tips (since they are the manufacturer, they may be able to help you best). :slight_smile:

17

I didn’t have any Dawn on hand, so I used what I had: Palmolive. No help.

I give up! Time to buy a hat…

18

I think you’re going to have to go to a salon. DIY kits are okay for some people, but they’re not meant to be used over and over and over again in a short period of time. This can result in you completely frying your hair, and being left with something like straw. :eek: If I were you, I’d go to a salon and have someone apply a semi-permanant color to your hair. Your hair should soak it right up and the offending color will be gone. I know it can be expensive, but it’s worth it. Would you rather spend a bit of money to have it corrected, or spend less money to have it damaged more?

19

Note that DIY color is exactly the same as the ‘professional’ dyes, whether you buy 'em yourself at a beauty store or pay far too much for a colorist to do it. Hair dyes are simply not all that chemically complicated. So when you pay someone to color your hair, you’re paying for their expertise, and nothing else. If you know of a colorist who is competent, and you can afford it, then go for it. But I’ve heard as many horror stories about bad colorists as I have about bad home-jobs. Don’t just go and find any random salon if you go that route.

Trying a semi-perm is probably worthwhile. Again, choose a nice ashy brown. Semi-perms shouldn’t do any significant lasting damage to your hair, and since you’re going darker, and your hair is already porous from previous dyeings, it should stick ok for a few weeks at least.

However, if a permanent color didn’t stick at all, you may have actually damaged the hair strands enough that they simply can’t grab color. I’ve never witnessed this myself, but I’ve heard that it can happen. There are products that claim to help (I think one is called ‘Porofill’) and you can probably buy them at the beauty store. But I wouldn’t expect amazing results.

If Herbal Essences is a permanent color (I don’t know off the top of my head) then it does contain ‘bleach’ - all permanent colors contain enough bleaches to lift the existing color a level or two and allow the new color to ‘take’ - an oxidizer (like peroxide) is necessary to make the aniline dyes develop. So permanent colors always take some color out, and always damage your hair.

Waiting four weeks is voodoo. The hair shaft doesn’t “heal” and there’s no way for the damage to go away (no matter what conditioners may claim on the bottle) because it’s dead tissue. The half inch or so of new hair you have in four weeks will be undamaged, and your scalp, which also takes a beating in these processes, will have healed, but it won’t do anything to fix the hair that’s already there.

The safest approach is to find a semi-perm color, in an ash brown, and try that, but no guarantees that it will be incredibly effective. Semi-perms don’t last as long or produce the same vibrant results that permanent colors can. Of course, you’re probably not after vibrancy, since that’s the main problem with your hair at present. :slight_smile: It’s probably worth a try, though, and if it doesn’t work, another attempt at permanent coloring is about the only thing left to try.

Oh, and please PLEASE don’t bleach your hair. Someone above suggested it, but colored hair is hard to bleach as it is, and it’ll damage your hair to hell. If your hair has been repeatedly colored already, bleach is gonna make it fragile and unpleasant, and it could even cause it to break near the root. I’ve heard horror stories about bleaching one time to many, leaving the person almost bald.

At any rate, I’ve always had good luck with the Clairol Professional line (you can buy it at Sally Beauty) and reasonably good results with the L’Oreal professional line (I forget what it’s called.) Good luck!

20

Thanks! No way, not going to bleach. I’ll try the semi-perm (so the hair won’t “heal” but would it be better to wait a while and let it fade some before trying again?) and then go for a trim…my hair is definitely long enough to stand a couple inches being chopped off and that should make me feel better about whatever damage I’ve done to it. (It does feel a little dry and brittle but nothing that a trim shouldn’t be able to fix.)

After this, no more dye jobs at home and quite possibly no more dying ever, ever again.