Talk to me about grey/grey ombré dyed hair!

[MinesaBottle]

I'd quite like to get this done, esp as I'm going grey anyway, but I haven't coloured my hair for years and don't really know how it all works with this. I have dark brown hair to just above shoulder length. I know I'd have to get it bleached first but how many times? And what sort of cost? I'm in London. And what is the maintenance like?

I had bleached hair that I had tinted grey quite a lot

My hair is naturally very dark brown

It took MONTHS to get my hair white blonde enough to go silver / grey - we had to bleach it in stages, anywhere that will take you from brown to white blonde straight away will end up damaging your hair

The maintenance is ridiculous. Bleach touch up every 8 weeks minimum. To maintain the silver it was silver shampoo and toner. Plus lots of deep conditioner to nourish knackered hair

I absolutely loved loved my silver grey hair, but it's a lot of work!

Please please don't go to anywhere that doesn't have lots of experience with bleach. I would strongly recommend the salon I went to- Bleach London, who as the name suggests, specialise in bleach. They have salons in Dalston, Soho and topshop Oxford circus - they get a lot of fix up jobs from people who've had bad bleach jobs elsewhere. Cannot recommend them highly enough.

Can also recommend their range of shampoos and conditioners - their purple shampoo is ace

It's great fun but it's a very big undertaking to get full head bleach!

It's the full head bleach I'm most worried about tbh as I'm aware it'll have to be done in stages, and I'm not sure about appearing in public in the between stages! I'll check out Bleach, thank you

Some of us brunettes have too much red in our hair and just can't go white enough blonde to make this happen. If I tried mine would end up some kind of grey orange blurgh

Hmm. I definitely have a little red in my hair. Didn't realise it was harder to bleach! It's not much though but it's there.

My colourists at Bleach said there were very few hair colours and types that couldn't be successfully bleached white (apart from I think Afro-Caribbean hair) but that many hair colours were more difficult to bleach successfully - they got a lot of bad bleach jobs where people had turned orange that they had to fix.

If you go to a very skilled technician they should be able to bleach and tone it correctly to avoid the dreaded orange. But that's one reason why I was bleached very slowly. They said if they slapped on too much and tried to take me too light, too quickly, that might result in dodgy tones (as well as breakages)

So it's unlikely to be impossible with the right colourist. But it's a big undertaking and may take a while. Mine took at least 9 months to get from warm brown to sufficiently white blonde to go silver. It was various shades of increasingly light blonde en route

I agree with Betty. I spent 18 months trying to go a nice clean blonde, starting with highlights and working up to a full head of bleach. I started from a base of warm brunette with about 30% (which was tinted but pretty much my natural colour before I started to go grey). The idea was that once I was predominantly blonde I would start allow the grey to come through over a period of time, blending it with blonde highlights.

I knew it couldn't happen overnight but honestly after about 6 lots of bleach on my hair and it looking and feeling like straw, numerous different hairdressers each trying to correct the horrid blorange colour the previous one left me with, I finally admitted defeat and dyed the whole lot back dark.

It was such a relief. I am just not cut out to be blonde. My hair doesn't want to cooperate AT ALL. When I am finally ready to go grey I'll just crop the lot of and take up hat wearing for a while.