go from BLONDE TO BROWN without ruining your hair!

okay i need to talk to everyone considering going from blonde to brown, and doing it yourself; ill be quick and to the point as there is quite a lot to go over;

basically everyones hair colour is naturally red (yes you are ginger), your hair colour is just different strengths of red, the darkest red is black and the lightest of red is blonde and then you have every colour in between.

this is why when you bleach dark hair it goes through the spectrum of reds, red to orange to yellow to blonde.

theoretically blonde/white has little to no red in it.

when bleaching your hair or dyeing your hair you have to understand you are either depositing colour/pigment into the hair particles or stripping pigment from the hair.

hair is made of follicles think of it like pores on your face, your hair is the same millions and billions of tiny holes, open(dry brittle) and closed (smooth) kind of like scales almost but we will get into that in another post.

so going from blonde to brown, you have little to no red left in your hair after all the bleaching or naturally, so to go brown or darker you need to put red back into the hair otherwise you get green pigment deposited.

so you have to PRE-PIG (pre pigment) the hair, deposit red colour.

you can do this in a multitude of ways, my preference is using a red dye and dyeing my hair red first.

your options are:

choose a brown with a natural red tint to it, like auburn or hazelnut colours.
 dye with semi permanent red first.
some people even just use red food colouring/.

a permanent red dye works best for me because of the strength you want to deposit as much red as possible.


then after your hair is red you can lay on the brown colour, you will have a slight tint of red to your hair after the first lot of dye, but this dye will stay in your hair and not wash out to a green tint of sludge.

so the trick here is to put the natural pigment back into your hair!

i suggest using a red shampoo for all you faux brunettes out there just to keep up the pigment deposit.