Trying to Save Money Between Highlights Appointments? Read This First.
Main image – Annatabakova/Stocksy
Michael Douglas is a celebrity hair stylist with a passion for empowering beauty fans to feel more confident with their hair. He is also a regular Live That Glow columnist, answering readers questions on all things hair care. Here, he advises on how to maintain hair colour between appointments.
I wanted to find a way to save money by increasing the time between my highlights appointments and have started using a colour depositing conditioner to blend my roots and colour. The product is good and I can definitely see the two parts of my hair are blending more but I’m not sure I’m getting the best out of the conditioner. For example, should I be applying it evenly throughout my whole head of hair and should I be leaving it on for the same length of time throughout? Any tips would be gratefully received!
Michael says:
There is no easy answer to this question. Lightening your hair means changing the structure of it internally. The highlighted bits of your hair are very different now to the natural bits of your hair, so trying to get these two very different materials to blend is difficult.
The options are to create the illusion of a lighter root or slightly darken the highlighted area so it more matches the natural root coloured hair. These are two different processes that would require two different approaches. The latter one of slightly darkening the highlighted hair is a bad idea – once you darken lightened hair it’s difficult to re-lighten it and you can’t temporarily lighten natural hair.
The best option is probably a hair make-up type product like Color Wow Root Cover Up. This is a light blonde powder that you can put on individual bits of the natural hair to create illusion of highlights. This is obviously temporary and gets washed out however it is probably the best temporary solution I’ve seen for stretching out the time between highlights.
It’s impossible for a coloured conditioner to create an illusion of a lighter root, so if you are seeing a blending of your blonde hair and natural hair though this method, it’s highly likely that it’s having a toning down effect on your blonde highlights and I would be a bit cautious about this as once you’ve toned down highlights it’s hard to make them bright again when you next get your highlights done.
So my best recommendation is probably a temporary make up highlighting product like I’ve mentioned above. Another option is using a coloured dry shampoo and spraying it lightly in at the roots between shampoos. Depending on how much you use and where you spray it, you can create a good disguise for your dark root area.
Get Glowing!
