How to fix dark ends and light roots

• Swap your regular color-treated shampoo for a purple toning one. It looks crazy in the tube, but the cool tones help cancel yellowness or brassiness. (Try Oribe Bright Blonde for Beautiful Color Shampoo and Conditioner.) It also helps brighten highlights.

• Gloss is a great thing. It can refresh color between dye jobs and makes your hair crazy shiny. But it's not intended for every day. "I had a client who overused her gloss, and her hair turned green," says Kaeding. Be sure to follow the instructions carefully. It's a gloss, not a daily conditioner. Try John Frieda Colour Refreshing Gloss.

• Now, this might not have been a mistake at all (you rock those dark brows with bleached hair, girl). But as a general rule, brows look best one to two shades darker than your hair color. Either seek a professional tinting job or use the dye sparingly. "Do one brow at a time, leave on the color for a minute, then wipe it off," says Kaeding. "If you want it darker, put it on for another few minutes. It's better to work in stages than to leave it on too long and turn your brows orange or even too dark. That never looks good."

Colourists use the term hot roots to describe the effect where your hair’s roots are visibly warmer than the rest of your hair colour.

Hot roots generally look lighter than the colour result in your lengths, and they may have a warm, orange tone.

Hot roots occur because the heat from your scalp causes the colour at the roots to develop faster than the colour on the mid-lengths or ends. This can lead to a lighter colour result at your roots than the rest of the hair.

Hot roots can also occur if you lighten your colour. The lightening process exposes naturally occuring warmth in your hair, which contributes a lighter, brassy tone to your colour result.

Know your limitations when going lighter. Select a colour within 2 levels of your natural colour, or a colour which is darker than your already coloured hair to avoid hot roots.

How to avoid hot roots:

Careful colour selection is critical to avoiding hot roots.

Moderate colour changes, especially when lightening your hair help to avoid the hot root effect. It is almost always a good idea to add cool tones if you are lightening your colour. The cool tones will mute warmth revealed during the lightening process, leaving a tonally balanced result.

If you have some greys and you want to colour with a warm colour (such as a golden or copper based colour), it can be best to blend your warm colour with a neutral colour. The neutral colour will fill pigments which are missing from any greys at your roots. Colours with brighter or warm tones will look lighter and brighter over greys. Blend your warm or bright colour with a neutral, the neutral pigments will anchor and fill the missing pigments in greys, leaving you with an eve, consistent colour finish.

We offer Duo colour kits which include everything you need to blend two colours together.

We recommend that you get in touch with our colourists for personalised colour advice to help you avoid lighter, brighter colour results over your roots.

Salon Accessories

Hairdressers know that you really need the right tools for true salon results at home.

Using a tint brush lets you apply colour with precision, and avoid colour layering or banding.

Technique

If you are going lighter or have had a problem with hot roots before, begin your hair colour application about 1.5 inches away from your roots. Continue applying the colour to your lengths, and then the ends of your hair, and only apply the colour to your roots in the last ten minutes of the total processing time.

Colour applied at your roots will process faster due to the heat from your scalp, so you want to place colour there last (unless you are looking to cover greys).

You can avoid hot roots and get even, consistent colour results with the right colour and right colour application.

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J. Nairn

I adore my colour from The Shade. They colour matched my previous brand but The Shade is much better quality. It’s better for my hair, simple to use and I live the results. I’m definitely a repeat customer.

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OBSESSED! Honestly wish I discovered The Shade sooner. My hair feels amazing afterwards and unlike normal box dye when I dye my roots they don’t turn a horrible orange/yellow. 100% recommend!

S. Harlow

Did you dye your hair, and your roots ended up being too light?

This is a really common problem when people dye their hair at home.

Do you know why your roots ended up lighter?

It has an easy explanation.

Many dyes, especially medium and light shades, use 30 volume developer.

The 30 volume developer lightens hair during the dying process.

In this way, while you apply the color, at the same time, you’re lightening your hair by two shades.

This is because new hair growth lightens faster because it’s younger hair, as some professionals say.

So now you know, if you want your roots to look the same shade as the rest of your hair, you should use 20 volume developer.

Now that you know the reason, let’s explore the solution to this very common problem.

How do you even out roots that are lighter than the rest of the hair?

The first thing is not to give up hope, everything related to hair has a solution.

You should be sure about which tone you applied—this is the only way to fix the problem.

If you apply whichever tone of dye, you could have a real hair disaster on your hands. Don’t take unnecessary risks.

Once you’ve identified the tone you had put in, you can even out your roots with another tone that will blend the two colors in your hair.

For example:

• If you put in a light brown 6, and your roots ended up lighter (light blonde 8), you can apply a medium blonde 7. In this way, your roots will darken by a shade, and the rest of your hair will lighten a shade.
• If you applied a brown 4 and your roots ended up lighter (light brown 6), you can put in a chocolate 5.
• If you dyed your hair a light blonde 8, and your roots ended up lighter (extra light blonde 9 or 10), you can put in a medium blonde 7.

As you’ll have noticed with the examples, the tones you can apply to fix your light roots are always an intermediate shade between your roots and the rest of your hair. 

In this way, you won’t lose the color range that you’re looking for, whether it’s blondes or browns, and you’ll be able to even out the difference in your hair tones.

But surely you’ll be asking: Why can’t I just apply the same tone again?

Of course, you can, but the difference between the roots and the rest of your hair will still be noticeable.

This is because the hair at your roots lightened with the first dying and the rest of your hair didn’t.

So, if you apply the same color again, even if it gets a little bit better, the difference will still be by one shade.

For this reason, the solution is always to find an intermediate shade that blends the two tones.

What volume developer should you use for the color mix?

As I mentioned at the beginning, your lighter roots are the result of the 30 volume developer.

Developer lightens hair.

It lightens your roots even more so, given that it’s young hair that has never been colored before.

To fix the difference between shades, I recommend that you use 20 volume developer.

Your hair will end up being an even, uniform tone.

If you were hoping to get an even lighter tone when you applied the dye, you still have time to achieve it.

Once you’ve evened out your color, you can start to apply even lighter shades.

But remember my advice, always with 20 volume developer.

For example:

• If you evened out your hair with a medium blonde 7, when you’re changing the color, you should use a light blonde 8.
• If you evened out your hair color with a light brown 6, when you’re changing the color, you should put in a medium blonde 7.

And in that way, whenever you’re changing your color, you’ll be lightening the tone gradually without running the risk that your roots end up lighter than the rest of your hair.