Box Dye Help Please

[40yearsyoung]

Hi MNer's

After some hair colour advice please...

I'm naturally ash brown (dull dishwater shade) and have always had blonde highlighted hair up until about a year ago when due to budget restrictions I decided to go for home dying, using box dye 5A light ash brown. I had it professionally darkened at the hairdressers first (eye wateringly expenses and total con!) then started using permanent dye in my natural colour. I then switched to semi permanent to improve the condition. What I wasn't prepared for, was that the coloured hair would fade (within weeks) to a nasty light red shade, leaving me with ashy grey roots. Also my very fine hair is so thin and drab looking in desperation I'm considering reverting to going back to blonde (with no spare cash).

Does anyone have any experience of putting bleached highlights on top of dyed brown home hair dye??

Thanks and sorry for the long and boring history of my rubbish hair.

I've not heard of 'professional darkening'. Normally you'd just dye over the light base, that's a good canvas.

The problem with hair-dying is that you're pretty much stuck doing it over and over because of roots, so you have to decide how you want to manage the roots issue.

For some, that's a box of semi and then they learn, via Youtube tutorials, how to do their own roots. Pros - cheap. Cons - hard to be exact, and after a few go-arounds of this method you can end up with overlap (where you brushed new dye on the undyed roots but overlapped onto the old dye) which gives a bit of a stripe effect.

For others, that means regular root touch ups at the salon. Costly, but less chance of the overlap stripes.

Your issue is also that the base hair colour has probably been lightening by the permanent dyes, so its 'natural' colour now will be a sort of strange orangey red.

One idea might be to - once you've decided if you're going to do your own roots or go the salon root route - strip all the old dye out of the hair with Color B4. It's not chemical so don't panic. It simply opens the follicles and lets the dye wash away. Without layers of different dyes your natural colour WILL be a grim pinky red. Don't panic. Have a semi-permanent colour of your choice put on. Then relax and have root-touch ups, with just one layer of dye on your hair until it's time for a refresh.

Thanks so much, yes professionally darkened was just dyed dark over the top but they charged me £220 for the privilege, hence my aversion to salons. Thanks for letting me know about colour b4, will def look into it, cheers ☺️