Hair Color. Tips for coloring your hair at home and saving money at the salon. How to avoid a at home hair color mess

Try non-permanent L’Oreal Haircolor at home. It’s harmless, inexpensive, and fun! I’ve tried L’Oreal Paris ColorSpa Moisture Actif with good results.

The L’Oreal haircolor boxes you buy at the supermarket and drugstore are fun to try.  All the various hair color brands, colors and shades entrance me when I go by this aisle.  For a long time I never stopped, but since I’ve had my hair long for some time, I found myself wanting to change my hairstyle. 

Cover the Gray with Non Permanent Hair Color

Since I don’t want to cut it, I discovered I could play around with non permanent colors and get a quick fix and a new look.  I always stick to the non permanent colors as I do not want any permanent hair dye disasters.  You never know how the color will take on your hair and look on your hair so I stick to the non permanent harmless version.

Non permanent hair dye works great for covering up the gray. Even if you use permanent color, you still have to go to the salon and get the roots touched up every few months. So, there is maintenance involved with either permanent or non permanent color. I don’t want to pay for the hair salon so I just do it at home myself. If you are doing at home color then non permanent is the way to go, especially if you are amateur newbie colorist.

Do you stare at the women on the hair color box?

Looking at all the women on the boxes instills a little fantasy in my mind.  It’s sort of like looking at the fashion magazine aisle.  Which woman do you want to be, you ask yourself.  Who do you want to look like?  What hair dye lady is “you”?  Ok well, never mind that the women on the hair color boxes are decades younger than us and don’t even know what a grey hair is because they’ve never had one.  This is a fantasy.  If they put old ladies on the box we probably wouldn’t choose that box would we.  Nope, we want to be young.  And L’Oreal Paris wants to tell us that if we buy that hair color, we will be young.  They feed us the fantasy we want to be fed, and then we buy it.

Gee let’s look at another fantasy of the L’Oreal hair color harlequin romance novel swirling in our heads and out of our wallets.   Our fantasy is that the color transformation (and being several decades younger like the box indicates) will be instant.  Not quite.  You do have open and apply the dye and it’s a mess. 

Home hair color without the Mess

I’ve tried doing the dye out of the shower but the dye gets everywhere and drips from my head even if I wrap it.  It is a mess.  It gets all over your floor, towels, sink and skin.  Yuk.  I actually know of several women who sit on their kitchen floor and have their husbands apply the stuff for them.  As an aside, women who have husbands that dye their hair for them are never ever divorced because clearly their husbands are loyal and love them unconditionally to be involved in this.  Either that or they want to save money and not have to pay for the salon!

I personally find the cleanest way to do the dye procedure is to do it all in the shower.  I shake the mixture, get in the shower and apply it.  I stay standing around in the shower with it on as long as I can tolerate it.  Since I have really thick hair I actually mix the dye with an additional cup or so of conditioner and leave that all mixed up and slathered on my hair for the fifteen minutes give or take.  Then I rinse and recondition and spray down my shower to clean up the mess before I get out.  You need to invest in one of those shower heads with a cord and sprayer attachment for this (they cost about thirty dollars).  I bought a shower head with a spray attachment hose at Home Depot for around $30. To install it, I needed an adjustable wrench to get the old head off, and then some white plumber tape to wrap around the pipe threads before twisting on the new shower head. The white tape helps prevents leaks. Hopefully, you have a man around that can do this for you, but you can do it yourself in a pinch. Having the sprayer reduces the hair dye mess and is well worth it. After spraying everything off and rinsing off and reconditioning I am done with no mess.  I never use the conditioner they provide because it doesn’t work that good for me and there is not enough provided. 

I find that right after the hair color goes on the color is most vibrant, although it always does have that slight tinge of a synthetic look because it is not after all natural.  After several shampoos it starts to get drab and within another month or two you might feel like doing it again.   Be forewarned that the color fades pretty slowly. If you’ve gone from blond to dark brown or something, it is definitely going to stay for a few months. Towards the end, the color can look a bit muddy and bad. The $8.99 price that is shown is rather expensive.  I always look for the sales and will usually find it for $6.99.  Overall non permanent color is a fun safe way to experiment and get gray hair covered for the short term.  I definitely give L’Oreal Paris no ammonia moisturizing colorant a thumbs up, The other popular brands of non permanent would work equally as well I assume, though I honestly have not had a chance to try another brand as yet…still on L’Oreal Paris.