HELP!! Hair colour disaster - Deep Purple!

[marmitesandwiches]

Help help help. Have just come back from hair dressers looking like a one-woman Shakespeare's Sister revival and much as I once liked their music do not regard this as A Good Thing.

My natural hair colour is deepish brown with slight chestnut glint. For a few years I've had golden beach blonde highlights which I liked but needed far too much upkeep. Have been meaning to go back to my roots for a while and as have had quite a shit time recently decided to go for a professional colour job to give me a boost. Soooo, I went to a local salon and had a demi-permanent colour put over the top. I knew I had to have some red in the colour to avoid a green tint but asked for the minimum and said that I preferred a coppery shade to anything mahogany. I also said I wanted it to look natural. The first coat they put on produced a brightish red colour so they washed it again gave me a v frantic blowdry and then put on another coat without the red. I left with it wet (a mistake a now realise but blowdrying just makes my hair frizz) and so didn't see the colour until I got home. I now see that it's a very very saturated deep purply colour - so dark it's almost black. Aaarrrggghh!!

I don't normally spend much time in Style and Beauty (although I definitely need to!) but am hoping some friendly colour expert(s) might be able to give me some advice on how to fix it so that DS1 will talk to me again and I can leave house without paper bag on head. I would go back to the salon but I don't have much time to spare and I'm not sure how they could fix it other than bleaching.

Thank you thank you thank you.

EEewwhh , sounds awful. So sorry it has turned out like this..

I catn adivut just hope you can reconstruct to the colour you want.
Good luck.

just saw your message,probaly you've sorted it by now but what i've done is use an extra lightening blonde colour-garnier nutrisse/loreal prefernce -not niceneasy.
It will strip out the colour but will go very warm (ginger) then i use again and it will normally go a mid blonde then put whatever colour you like on top.I I used to use full on bleach to strip colour but it knackers your hair.meantime use vosene or head and shoulders it really strips colour specially red out of hair.good luck

Noooooo - no disrespect Kittyispretty but there is a better more effective way. If the OP has had a too-dark artificial colour applied then putting a blonde box dye will not do anything except dry it further unless you are talking a pre-lightener (i.e bleach). But there is a better way than bleach too!

Go to a Boots or Superdrug and get ColourB4 Extra Strength. Follow the directions. You basically mix 2 bottles together, apply to your hair, leave it for an hour then rinse for about 10-15 minutes (read instructions) shampooing it after with the "buffer"

It will shrink the artificial dye molecules allowing them to be flushed from your hair with water. It will expose a lighter colour, on you it will probably still be brown with a slightly coppery hue which is the peroxide from previous dyes and the colour they create.

You might be lucky and actually quite like the colour it exposes. You might be unlucky and not like it that much, which means you can recolour after a few days (you do have to wait a few days, read instructions). You will probably find it reoxidises slightly over the first 2 days after doing it (which means it will slightly darken and dull down) but the purple colour will not return.

It does not strip or alter the structure of your hair like the only other option which is bleach and to be honest its less drying in the long run than washing repeatedly with dishwashing liquid or head and shoulders which is another popular method of dulling down colour.

Check out the pictures on my profile - there is a recent one that shows how my hair turned out recently after removing a medium brown from my hair using it.

In fact, that picture of me on my main profile page you get when you click on TattyDevine is me with colourb4 and nothing else (i.e I had just used it the night before and had not recoloured)

If you have a pathological fear of any ginger (doesn't sound like it if you have a chestnut tone) then buy a Clairol 8 wash medium brown which is fine to use straight away, you need to wait a week before using a semi permenant or permenant colour or basically anything with hydrogen peroxide in it which is what hairdressers also use (even dark colours have hydrogen peroxide in them as its how it gets into the hair)

Tatty none taken,just years of dyeing(buggering up) my hair have made me take the softly softly approach,before bringing in the big guns(bleach!),I havent heard of B4 sounds interesting,without hijacking OP's thread,what exactly is it?

Ooops, you did explain what it is already, Tatty,I'll get me coat!,im a newbie here and it is showing

Thanks for the excellent advice (and sorry it's taken me so long to check back in). I washed five times with Head & Shoulders when I first got home and then tried adding Fairy Liquid into the mix the next day. Neither seemed to really bring out much colour, but I do think it is starting to fade a little: Still very dark but less saturated and losing the purple tones so I think I might wait a week and see how it's looking before I try anything else. Hopefully by then will have recovered from initial trauma. Tatty - Colourb4 sounds like a good option if things don't improve.

Think the colour probably not actually as bad as it sounds. We went to a medieval festival over the weekend () and lots of people there had hair my colour. Presumably most of them did positively choose the colour. Maybe I just need to start hanging out in the right places .