Emerson Salon – Capitol Hill Seattle

This week I have been busy with corrective coloring.

There are two reasons why a color service is deemed “corrective”:

1) A hairstylist formulated and/or consulted with a client wrongly.

2) A client has been coloring his/her hair at home for awhile and has led to a problem.

When a stylist has made an error, the best thing to do is to have that stylist fix the problem if possible. This isn’t always possible, and so we end up correcting other stylists’ work. Each salon uses their own color system. Color systems are not alike. There are some similarities and luckily, experienced stylists can almost always remedy these errors easily. OTC hair color is too variable and the chemical makeup of OTC hair color is inferior to professional salon color. OTC hair color is already formulated in a bottle, and it comes with a standard developer. Most clients’ hair is not standard, and multiple issues arise. Here, I will explain why hair ends up too dark!

Hair Darkening:

• Over time, the home colorist colors the entire lengths of his/her locks, resulting in an overabundance of color pigment deposit and an end result of the ever-common “Too Dark Ends”.
• This effect is further aggravated with the presence of any amount of gray hair on the head, because gray hair requires a different chemical formulation than non-gray hair does.
• When harsh chemicals (usually found in OTC hair color products) are layered onto hair strands continually, the hair’s integrity, elasticity, and porosity are severely compromised.

What we do:

• Here at the salon, when we color a client’s hair darker, we don’t color the entire length every time. We do a “Retouch”, once our client’s hair is the color they love. Depending on the home hair care program utilized, the ends may or may not fade.
• We use and recommend our tested color-safe products in the salon to maintain our client’s hair color in between appointments. This ensures optimum color longevity! Some darker colors, like reds, will fade a little even then, so we do what is called a “Refresher” service to the ends of the hair. This is not the same thing as depositing permanent color to the hair that has already been colored, because that leads to damage over time and too-dark ends.

What can you do if you have this problem:

• Make an appointment with your hair professional. We can remove the pigment safely and the chemicals we use for color correction in the salon are safe and will not damage your hair further.
• It usually takes two or three appointments to get your hair into completely stellar shape. Your hair may need a further application, depending on how the OTC color lifts out of your hair, or it may need reconditioning to even out your hair’s uneven porosity that results from over-processed hair lengths.

Here is what normal and damaged hair strands look like when magnified:

If you attempted to color your hair at home using box color and the result was not what you were expecting…don’t panic. Make an appointment today and we’ll fix your hair problem.

-posted by Lancer