How to successfully get pastel pink or rose gold hair

[ouch321]

Has anyone toyed with getting either pastel pink or rose gold hair?

Not so keen on the bright or magenta tones.

I've looked at Schwarskopf Live permanent pink, shade Cool Rose, Lime Crime and Bleach London and none of these products seem that effective as per reviews with people with specifically bleached hair saying it doesn't show or does but fades within a wash or two.

So if anyone is experienced in pink hair at home products or works in a salon and knows about this I would love to hear.

Thanks

A friend of a friend has this. The longest most gorgeous pastel pink hair. It looks amazing on her. She has to continuously bleach it and then dye it. I think every month to keep up with the darker roots

I managed it accidentally by running out of my bright pink dye over lockdown... Directions cerise (which this was originally - super bright bold pink) mixed with a bottle of conditioner might give the same effect 😂

The ease depends on what you’re already working with. Natural blondes will find this easier to achieve.

Overly processed hair won’t hold on to colour well, so colour upkeep would be necessary.

I think some people either add a drop of dye into their conditioner to refresh the colour whenever they wash their hair, or they may add a drop of a darker colour when initially dying it so their hair may hold the colour for slightly longer? I haven’t tried this myself

Find a salon where they use Cult Colour. Your hair will need to be bleached first, but the colours do last longer than most. Red and pink do fade very quickly on me, tho, and it probably wouldn't last more than a couple of weeks.

I got rose gold.by trying to dye my hair light mauve pink. My hair is dark blonde.

Don’t put any live xxl colour on it, no hairdresser will thank you for it.

Your hair needs to be a very pale blonde or bleached to a very pale blonde and then you can use any semi permanent baby pink dye. It does come with upkeep, bright colours just aren’t permanent.

Especially for pastel pink you need a very very light hair colour so you will need to bleach your hair if you dont. After that if you're going a cool pastel pink, you need to take out the brassy tones out of your hair with toner. For rose gold or other warm pastels you can skip that step.

If you don't have to bleach your hair or tone it, the rest is super easy to do it yourself. You pick a BRIGHT shade of pink from any vegetable based dye brand such as Adore, Manic Panic, Directions etc. NOT pastel, but a very strong color. The important thing is that the undertone matches what you want to achieve. So if you want a peachy pink you'd go for a bright pink with red/yellow undertones, if you want baby pink you would go for a bright pink with blue undertones etc.

Then you mix in a few drops or squirts of the dye into a huge tub of cheap conditioner or hair mask until you achieve the desired colour. Obviously the more dye = the brighter/darker the colour + the less you have to bleach your hair.

Putting it on when it's diluted in conditioner is just like putting on normal conditioner, very easy. You can do it on wet or dry hair and can leave it as long as you want without it damaging your hair. The longer you leave it the more intense and longer lasting the colour will be. A ton of people leave it overnight, even for pastels. If your dye mix is a light pastel, you're not going to wake up with neon pink hair so don't worry!

I can advise on different dyes based on 15+ years of pastel pink hair ( and various other pinks). But the right dye depends on what you can buy in your area, and what you want your final colour to be. Hair crazy forums have a ton of pictures and info, which I cant link right now but it's easy to google.

Also speaking from experience, a dye you dilute at home will last 5x longer than a pastel dye they use at a hairdresser. I've done pink at a ton of hairdressers in 4 different countries and they all washed out in a few washes.

@NoMoreMrNiceGaius

Thank you very much for recommending the HairCrazy forum.

Really impressed looking at the photo sections. Some amazing looks.

I rather like the shade achieved by the girl called Nunify in the Pink Section. Will try to link.

www.haircrazy.com/gallery/colours/pink/73008/

Seems she used manic panic cotton candy.

My hair is ginger presently. Shade 6R by Clairol Nice and Easy. So I know I'd have to strip the red tones out first. Maybe use ColourB4. Have bleached hair at home using something in Boots before, maybe Jermone Rusell bleach maybe.

My natural colour is a 'dark blonde' I.e. sludge light brown. Level 7.

You’ll need to lighten if you want to achieve similar to the photo. I’ve never used Colour B4 (a lifetime of colours here) but Scott Cornwall Decolouriser in the blue box has done the trick. Or bleach. I was pretty impressed by Plex Bleach recently. My hair is blue, turquoise and various shades of purple. The blues go from pale to navy so I needed a pretty white base.

One of my friends is currently a peachy/rose gold. She bleached first then mixed a few drops of a Manic Panic pale pink and a little bit of Directions Rubine in conditioner. So maybe have a look at mixing colour bases to get what you want.

The Nice n Easy fades pinkish.

Whatever you do, don't add a new permanent colour on top when you get bored after using something like Manic Panic, though. That's how hair melts.

Melting hair?

I thought Manic Panic and the like were supposed to be relatively kind to hair...

directions Carnation Pink over bleach gives a candy floss colour but fades. i do mine with flamingo pink over bleach, but then i don’t have a job with a dress code to worry about.

Well I'm WFH now and I keep the camera off...

:-)

I have dark blonde hair with some old grown out blonde highlights and have been using Garnier Olia in Deep Rose. It's quite bright to start with but after one wash tones to a candy floss / pastel and then continues to fade nicely into peach tones. I re-do about every 6 weeks or so. Picture shows it freshly done.

Another good website for photos is www.hairdyegallery.com/.

The "cotton candy pink" colour you likes in those photos requires a very very light base with almost no brassiness so please be aware that it is very damaging to your hair to bleach and tone to get the right base. If you go for something a bit more peachy you will have a lot easier time imo and it won't feel muddy if you have any bits left with stubborn brassy/yellow color.

This is my hair when I used to first dye it it with diluted Directions Cerise. It was already a very soft color to begin with (much softer than the photos), and faded into a very typical cotton candy pink like your photos and even after 2-3 months it remained a very pale pastel pink.

In my experience If you start with a pastel hair dye it will fade very fast and it will often fade completely back to blonde or in patches.

images.app.goo.gl/6kksQQsy6UdPiLFy7

Something like this is easier to achieve with dark blonde hair, you still need to bleach it but not as much and you dont need to tone to platinum

Lighter version:
images.app.goo.gl/qYHkD6N1WUjFxP3w9

@ouch321

Melting hair?

I thought Manic Panic and the like were supposed to be relatively kind to hair...

They're kind in themselves - but some of the pigments used in them have metallic compounds (like Henna does) that react with the chemicals in permanent colours. And that reaction means heat - your hair melts.

My hairdresser did a test strand 9 months after I'd used one as I was going to be having a permanent colour. There wasn't a trace of the dye left visually. He kept the strand to show me, as he'd never seen such a strong reaction before, but made a point of calling straight away just in case I felt the urge to use a box colour in the meantime.

He'd taken a sample from the crown and one from the nape of my neck that looked like virgin hair - both were unrecognisable - they looked as though they'd been boiled in Veet and then blowtorched - he said the reaction was almost immediate on both, so had that happened on my scalp, there wouldn't have been enough time to get it all out.

So I'd say yes, Manic Panic is brilliant (I love the colour choice) - BUT - you cannot get bored and tosh any old box dye on top when you're bored with it.

Have a look at Eve Jenkins on Insta (one of the contestants on Glow Up)

She did an IGTV a couple of months ago about her pastel hair

Don’t know why I scribbled my face out cus anyone who knows me will know it’s me but

I did it a few years ago! My hairdresser did the base for me, I went from dark brown and she bleached it to blonde and did a root stretch for me, as I didn’t want the pink right against my skin and wanted a dark root if that makes sense? Then she used a Schwarzkopf rose gold/pinky colour. I then used to use the L’Oréal wash out colorista pink once a week to keep the colour topped up

I have bleached hair and I recently used the crazy colour rose gold which was a gorgeous colour. Only lasts a couple of washes though!

I've got pastel purple/silver hair. My hairdresser had to bleach first, then used a toner to get the silver, then the purple on top. The purple dye doesn't last very long at all, but I use a Viral colour deposit shampoo, and it's fantastic - better results than the original dye. They do lots of different colours, including pastel pink and rose gold I think. But you'd need that bleached base first.

I wash with the shampoo no more than twice a week, and depending on the depth of colour I want, I leave it in for longer/shorter and then sometimes wash with normal shampoo straightaway to make it more pastel.