All About Hair Lightening & Bleaching
It strips your hair of all moisture and natural protectants, making it very dry and fragile. However, bleach is the most effective way to lighten your hair. To go from stage 1 to stage 6 or 7 may take only about 2 or 3 bleaching sessions. With that being said, dark hair has loads of eumelanin, making it naturally more difficult to lighten. It naturally gravitates toward the darker end of the color scale. A standard oxidizing strength for permanent, no-lift hair color.
Similar to the toner, a purple shampoo helps eliminate orange or yellow hues in your hair. Using a non-chemical toner is a great way to upkeep your blonde hair to keep it from getting brassy. Use a purple shampoo once or week or whenever your hair starts to get too yellow. Once you figure out your hair level and how light you want it, you can determine the wait time. If you want your hair to lift as light as possible then leave the mixture on for 35-4o minutes . Adams recommends checking your hair to see if it’s lifted to the level you desire and says, “you wouldn’t want to lift hair from one to seven if you only need to lift it to four or five.”
Every bleach / color process damages your hair shaft – always use a protective hair care treatment before and after dyeing. In the earlier post, we have a deeper understanding of bleach and developer. We know that developers come in different volumes but is totally unsure how they work and which is suitable for our needs. Since it directly affects the color and shade of our hair, it is important for us to understand color levels and developers. Toning adds in some range of blues and purples to give the hair body and depth and look more like a color balance found in nature, yet achieved unnaturally. We now understand how to look at the color scale and how to proceed in theory.
Getting them together is ideal because the developer will be the right strength for the color on the package. Purchase more developer and hair color than you think you might need. Running out of developer and hair color when you are halfway into the dyeing process can cause your hair to come out uneven or improperly dyed. Avoid this by getting an extra box of developer and hair color so you have it on hand. Couplers are chemical compounds that define the color of the hair dye.
Apply with a color brush or paint brush and try your hand at some DIY balayage. “Keep off the scalp and focus around your face and ends,” advises Schafer. And as with every application we’ve learned how to make hair curly without perm so far, applying heat will help kick things into gear and speed up the process. Changing up the color of your hair is one of the easiest ways to feel like you’re a completely different person.
Medium blonde would be considered a level 8 on the color scale. Tone the hair with any of wide range Ugly Duckling’s toners. This will get rid of any remaining yellow and take hair to a stunning white blonde.