On a recent girls’ night in, Jennie Volpert and Nicole Ehlers were planning on a relaxing evening of chatting and coloring each other’s hair. Ehlers, a dark blond, was helping Volpert, a brunet, lighten her hair.
“Then I realized it was too light,” says Volpert, a 24-year-old higher-education fundraiser. “It was going orange. It was a scary moment.” So scary that Volpert called her mom, a former beautician, at 11 p.m. and cried for help.
“The only way [to fix it] was to darken it. So we went for drinks and [then] bought new color,” Volpert said, adding she’s still a fan of at-home coloring. “It’s just so easy. And it looks good when you do it right.”
Volpert’s is a familiar story to professional colorists. “We’ve seen too much go wrong” with home coloring, says Michael Ferno, colorist at Trio salon in Evanston.
Ryan Williams, a color expert who takes frantic calls from sobbing home-colorists on the Clairol hot line, says he has “heard it all” when it comes to color mistakes. “How your hair turns out depends on your hair prior to the color. Three people can pick the same color and they will all get different results.”
“We’re dealing with chemicals here. It’s a science,” Ferno says. It’s about understanding which color is best for you, adds Nic Dasovich, of J. Andrews Salon on North Dearborn Parkway.
“Every mistake can be avoided if people would do a strand test before applying color to their hair,” Williams says. “That’s what the instructions say. You can’t go wrong if you strand test. The strand test never lies.”
“It’s fun to experiment, especially if you’ve got short hair,” Dasovich says. “The worst thing that can happen is you have to go to a salon and get it cut off.”
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What’s the difference?
Permanent color: Just what it means. This color doesn’t come out, and a line of demarcation forms between new hair growth and the colored hair. Only a professional colorist can restore hair to one color.
Semi-permanent: Fades a little with each washing.
Rinse: Lasts for six shampoos–maybe longer, depending on the color or hair type.
Highlights: Strands of hair are stripped of natural color and then lightened. The highlights are permanent.
Advice from those who know
Some tips from the professionals on coloring at home:
– Have a friend help you get the hard-to-reach places on your head.
– Use latex kitchen gloves instead of the ones in the hair-color kits.
– Spread Vaseline or a deep conditioner around your hairline to keep the color from dripping onto your skin.
– If you are darkening gray roots, use a scrubbing motion on your scalp with your fingertips. Don’t pull the color through the rest of your hair.
– If you don’t like the results, consult a color expert at a salon or call the hot-line number on the box.
Help, my hair turned green!
PROBLEM: In eliminating highlights, my hair turned green! How do I get it back to normal?
“This is a common one,” Clairol’s Ryan Williams says. “The strands end up getting blue, gray, green or purple.”
FIX: “Depending on what color the hair turned, use a color that neutralizes. If the hair turned grayish or greenish, add some red. Red over green doesn’t turn red because they cancel each other out,” Williams says.
Whenever you end up with bad color, fixing it is a two-step procedure in which you first take the pigment out of your hair and then replace it with the color you want. Presuming your hair is medium brown, you would first use a reddish color such as Nice ‘n Easy 108, for example, to get your hair to a reddish-blond. Then use a brown color to get back to a light neutral brown, Williams says.
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ctc-woman@tribune.com
