Orange Hair: Disaster Recovery

Hi All,

There’s been a lot of discussion about orange hair and how best to deal with it. I’ve tried here to give you a brief overview of how best to tackle and solve the problem.

Here’s some things you should consider:-

1. Stay calm – your natural impulse may be to run out to the shops and buy something to colour over the orange. Don’t! First take some deep breaths, and read the following information thoroughly. Where possible we would recommend that once things have gone wrong you a) go to a professional salon (like us) to get it fixed and b) understand that ‘fixing’ may not be colour shade accurate ie. You can expect the salon to get you to brown say, but you have to allow a little flexibility in the shade of brown.
2. Remember that each time you colour your hair you can damage it, especially at home. If your colour has gone wrong once you’re better off trying to fix it professionally than risk it going wrong again and needing another colouring to fix it (three attempts). It could cost you more in the long run and leave you with badly damaged hair trying DIY.
3. That said Home Colour is a big market and many people do colour at home successfully – but I guess when things go wrong call in the professionals.
4. Ok so you if you have decided to proceed, consider how light or dark the orange is? Eg is it dark blonde, dark brown etc.
5. What tone of orange is it? Yellow Orange, orange, red orange etc
6. Next we have to consider the correct base and tone needed to correct the orange.
• Yellow Orange will need a violet or grey tone
• Orange will need a blue or grey tone
• Orange Red will need a blue or possibly green tone
• Red Orange will need a green tone
7. Please note that certain tones work well with certain base shades and the correct developer – I guess this is the art of a good Colourist.
8. If you call a salon for help, remember that the stylist can’t see you so they can only guess at what will be needed based on your description, which may be inaccurate because you may not be able to explain in technical terms what your hair is like.
9. Always choose a colourist that has been highly recommended. Colour Correction is not easy and an inexperienced stylist could do just as much damage or more than you can do at home.
10. Make sure a thorough consultation is given and that both of you are happy with the course of action. Watch how confident and assured your stylist is in explaining the steps necessary to recover your hair.
11. Tint won’t lift tint. If the colour is too dark a bleach may be needed to lighten the colour before re-colouring.
12. You may have to make some decisions in consultation with your stylist. For example a semi-tint is the kindest correction method but it may not be able to achieve the exact target colour you want. The target colour may be possible but might require some bleach as above to lighten and this could cause some further damage to your hair – do you want to take that risk?

I really hope this has been helpful to anyone who finds themselves in this situation. If I was unclear on anything let me know and if you’d like to book in for a professional opinion please feel free to book a free consultation with me on 0845 88 88 333.

Thanks (and Good Luck)