3 On Your Side: Home Hair Color Advice
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Want to wash that gray right out of your hair or maybe just change your look? A trip to a salon can often cost upwards of a hundred bucks, so these days more and more women are skipping the stylist and doing their color at home. If you're considering it, Consumer Reporter Jim Donovan has advice, so you don't end up spending additional money to repair a color catastrophe.
When it comes coloring their hair at home, some women do, and some women just won't. For those that do, JoJo Clapson, stylist and co-owner of HeaD AreA salon in Center City says there are some things that need to be considered. She says, "It's permanent color, you either have to bleach it, cut it or grow it out, once it's in, it's in."
When coloring hair at home Clapson recommends staying close to the color that nature gave you. She says, "You can't put one thing on and be from black to blonde in one go. Just go a little lighter or a little darker, I wouldn't go for a complete makeover at home."
Angelia Fick encountered a problem when she had a change of heart after coloring her hair at home. She says, "I tried to dye my naturally dark brown hair black and then I decided I didn't want it to be black anymore, and I could not get it to go back to dark brown." According to Clapson, "that's because hair color doesn't lighten previously colored hair." Clapson also warns that you can't always count on the photo on a box. With that in mind, she says, "Stick to a neutral color. Because a neutral, is going to have all the colors of the rainbow in it, instead of grabbing something that's an ash or a red, which could come in as green or too too red."
One mistake Clapson says that women make is that when coloring their hair at home they put all the product on at once. That often causes the roots to end up being a lighter color than the rest of the hair because the porous ends will absorb more color. She says, "So it may be gorgeous, warm brown and on the very bottom could be like inky and black." The way to solve that problem is to leave the coloring product on your roots for a longer period of time than the rest of your hair, especially the ends.
Also, here's something else to think about. She says, "I have heard from many people that they buy a box of color and then they run out halfway through." That's what happened to Jessica DeParasis. She made several attempts to fix a botched coloring job that she done at home. She says, "I was already blonde, and I was just trying to go more blonde," By the third attempt at a fix, she says, "There wasn't enough color in the box, it was kind of polka dotted and speckled." Clapson says those hair color boxes can be misleading when it comes to coverage. She says that if your hair is chin length or shorter, you could get away with just one box, otherwise, you should buy a little more than you need just to be safe.
By the way, if you do screw up your color at home be sure to tell your stylist exactly what you did to your hair. Otherwise when they try to fix it, things could get worse. Not only will you shell out big bucks to repair the color, you may end with an unexpected hair cut to make yourself presentable!
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Reported By Jim Donovan, CBS 3
