Home Hair Color Problem

Color hair at home — Photo: Tmon/Shutterstock

Q: I have colored my hair with an at home kit {brand name deleted}, using a medium brown color. My hair turned black. I have since found out that my hair was porous & soaked up the color. A friend suggested that I put highlights in my hair to soften the look of my way to dark black hair. She went to Beauty School, so I trusted her skills. Never again!

My dark black hair color has since faded quite a bit, but my blonde highlights look horrible! They're not very even, and some areas are thicker than others. My question is, can I go to a professional salon & have them color my hair? I want to go back to my natural color, which is a medium brown.

Will they be able to cover up my highlights & return my faded black color, back to my natural color? By re-coloring my hair all over, could I possibly end up with a few lighter brown areas (from the highlights, which would be ok)?

A: You've encountered a common problem with at-home hair color. Many women don't realize how their hair's condition can affect the results of hair color. In your case, the porosity of your hair allowed the color to penetrate more deeply than anticipated and subsequently allowed the excess color to fade fairly quickly.

By trying to "fix" the color through adding highlights, you really only added an unbalancing element to the overall look. (What I would have recommended was a "peroxide cap" to soften the overall color.)

Your best option, which you seem prepared to undertake, is going to a professional stylist for a corrective color procedure. They should be able to give you something very close to your natural color.

However, you need to make sure that you go prepared with all the information you can have: take the name of the color kit you initially used (including the name of the color and preferably the package if you still have it) and the name of any color used to create the highlights (or if they were created simply by bleaching).

The stylist/colorist will need to know this information to be better able to make decisions as to how to proceed to get back to your natural color. By knowing the base colors of the hair color already used on your hair, he/she should be able to avoid unfortunate color reactions.

You should be sure to talk about what you'd like to achieve from your corrected color. There's a good possibility that you can get a multi-tonal look in the finished color, provided it isn't necessary to strip the darker color too much, and the stylist can use a more translucent toner to achieve a natural look.

©hairfinder.com

See also:

How to color your own hair

What can go wrong with hair color services