Whether you want to try out fun new colors or are hoping to cover up gray strands, dying your hair is a beauty essential for many women. However, for many salon color treatments costing upwards of $100, most of us cannot afford to get our hair colored monthly by a professional. This reality leaves us with the option of embracing the rooty look or coloring our hair at home. If you want to try coloring your hair at home but are fearful of disastrous results, keep reading to discover some tips that can help you become a pro in no time.
1. Be Precise
Many women who aren’t experienced in dying their own hair tend to just stripe the dye into their hair wildly. It’s important to maintain precision in your application of at-home color to ensure that you cover all of your hair evenly.
2. Buy More Than One Box
You might think that one box of hair dye will be sufficient until you get home and realize it only colors half of your hair. Single boxes of hair dye are really only designed to cover a full head of thin, fine hair.
If you have thick hair or even just hair that is not particularly thin, you should buy at least two boxes of hair dye to avoid having to take another trip to the drugstore with half a head of colored hair.
3. Stay Within a Shade Range
If you want to bleach your hair or undergo an extreme color change, you really should save up for a salon treatment. When dying your hair at home, you should stick to colors that are one to two shades lighter or darker than your natural hair color in order to avoid disastrous results.
4. Test First
It’s important to test the hair dye you want to use on a strand of hair before you dye your entire head. No matter how good the Internet reviews are for a certain brand or shade of hair dye, the results are not guaranteed for your hair.
It can be frustrating to delay your coloring process to do a strand test, but you’ll thank yourself profusely if the strand you do test ends up turning an unexpected color you’d never want on your whole head.
5. Use Chapstick
You don’t want to spend an hour coloring your hair flawlessly only to end up with tell-tale streaks of the dye on your forehead and ears.
In order to avoid striping hair dye across your skin that won’t wash out for a week, apply Chapstick to your hair line and the tops and lobes of your ears to prevent the dye from sticking to your skin while you color your hair.
6. Color Roots First
Apply hair dye from the top of your hair down. Your roots require the most color and processing time, so start applying color there first. Then, work your way down to the ends of your hair, distributing the dye evenly as you go.
7. Time Yourself
The amount of time you leave the dye in your hair needs to be precise. Leaving the color in your hair for too little an amount of time can prevent the dye from taking full effect and leave you with splotchy hair.
On the other hand, leaving hair dye on your head for too long can irritate your scalp as well as give you a darker color that you didn’t want or expect. To prevent timing mistakes, read the back of the dye box to see how long you need to leave the color in your hair and set a timer as soon as you finish applying the dye.
Coloring your hair at home can be a daunting challenge. However, if you use the tips in this post, you can learn how to master at-home dye jobs to save yourself tons of money you’d normally spend at the salon.
