Box Color Beware!
So you’re strolling through the aisles of the drug store and you find yourself standing in front of the box hair color section. All of the boxes are adorned with beautiful models with glamorously styled hair and pretty colors. Suddenly you feel inspired to change up your color or do a little routine maintenance or touch up. You begin picking up the boxes and comparing colors and brands. Each one promises long lasting results, excellent gray coverage, and amazingly sleek and shiny hair. Maybe you feel like going a little lighter even though you are a brunette, you’re drawn to the dark golden blonde shades. After you’ve spent 30 minutes reviewing all of your choices and narrowed down your selection to 5 different boxes you finally make your decision and off to the check out you go.
Merrily skipping out of the store, confident with your purchase you arrive at home ready to apply your color and you can’t wait to look just like the model on the front of the box. Well guess what girly – you could be in for a rude awakening when you wash that freshly applied color out of your hair. Generally attempting to color your own hair with box color will have two outcomes – 1.) you will inadvertently end up with orange hair, or 2.) you will end up having to make an emergency appointment at a salon to fix your mistakes.
Realizing you’ve just made a huge mistake and your hair is closer to the color of a carrot than the golden blonde the box promised. YIKES! What’s a girl to do? Run back to the store and buy a darker color and try to reverse the damage you’ve done? That seems a bit like playing Russian roulette at this point. Well, you certainly can’t run around looking like Carrot Top so you hastily ring up your salon to explain that you have a “HAIR EMERGENCY” and you MUST get in immediately! If you’re fortunate enough to get an appointment before anyone sees you with your new orange hair, lady luck is on your side.
As you await your scheduled appointment you start scratching your orange colored head asking yourself “what in the world went wrong here?”
Why You Didn’t Get That Color You Were Promised From The Box.
Sure drug store hair color costs you pennies, and your salon’s color prices are significantly higher – but as they say, “you get what you pay for!”
Drug store hair colors must be formulated to deliver the color on the front of the box to literally anyone’s hair. That means each person who purchases that box will get the same formulation, despite each of them having completely different types of hair texture, tones, and varying degrees of color resistance. Because of this, box colors are developed with extremely strong chemicals, which causes damage to your hair’s integrity making it dry, brittle, and porous. This also means you end up with split ends, hair loss, and breakage.
In addition, these super strong color’s chemical make up is much harder to remove when you are ready for a change. So if you are the type of person who likes to transform your hair color frequently the use of box color will cause extreme damage to your hair and, your color may not yield the look you want to achieve. So in the instance of box hair colors, the “one size fits all” approach isn’t a good idea – but that’s what you get!
As tempting as the savings and ease may seem, you could end up paying more than double the cost of the initial salon coloring to fix whatever disaster you and the box color have created. There’s also a good chance you will loose some length in salvaging process.
Professionally Applied Salon Hair Color Could Not Be More Opposite.
In-salon color is customized by your stylist, and the color is formulated specifically for you to achieve the look you want. It requires a bit of science and understanding of the color wheel. Stylists not only know the in’s and out’s of your specific hair type, but they know how to work with the underlying pigments of your hair and how to manipulate the color to be perfect for you. Think of it this way. If you mixed red and blue paint together you get purple. If you mix yellow and red you get orange. The same idea applies to hair color. If your hair is an ash or cool tone and you want to change your color to a warm shade of brown for example, your stylist knows exactly which colors to mix and when applied to your current color the end result will be the color you want. Everyone’s hair is different, and what works for one person doesn’t mean it works for everyone.
So in summary, the chance for error when you use drug store box hair color is high, and in the end may turn out to be much more expensive if you have to go to the salon to have it corrected.
Your hair is precious and can easily be damaged by box color. So heed our advice and skip the drug store and make an appointment with your stylist for your next color. In the end you will be glad that you did.
Contact Garnish Hair Studio + Extension Bar for your next color appointment.
