[karrot3]

My natural hair color is light brown and for many years I have been highlighting my hair. It had gotten pretty long and as you can probably guess kept getting lighter and lighter until I started to look like a bleach blonde with bad roots. My husband suggested I try for a strawberry blonde. Coincidentally, the new hairdresser I went to consult with suggested the same thing. Well, the result was a much shorter layered do which looks more like a reddish brown or auburn. The hair color might be pretty on someone else but looks crappy on me. I am fair skinned with very blue eyes and the hairdresser said it would bring out these attributes. Instead, it just looks wrong. I have had this color for two weeks and have started to shampoo with Prell and deep condition with Redken Extreme. It has faded a little bit to a lighter reddish brown with some gold. In the meantime, I went to another hairdresser who said she could put some toner on it to counteract the red but is hesitant to apply bleach. When it was colored, I had at least an inch of roots to which the hairdresser applied a stain to "warm them up". My appointment with the other hairdresser is in three weeks. She suggested that I do a lot of deep conditioning in the meantime. My question is, is it possible to return to a natural looking blonde (not a white blonde) without major damage to my hair. Also would going golden blonde be easier on my hair than an ashy blonde. Please help me! I hate my hair. The cut is bad too but at least I know it will grow. My main desire is to just be blonde again--even if it's a much darker blonde!!

[Perito]

If it were my hair, I would have the hairdresser use a reducing-type color remover, like ColorFix on my hair. That would remove the red. It would also be much more gentle on the hair than Effasol or bleach. You should be able to recolor immediately after.

It is definitely possible to do what you want to do, and it's not all that hard.

Most people find golden blonde to be less desirable than ash blonde. It's easier to achieve golden blonde (aka brassy blonde), but usually that will occur when the hair color fades anyway. Try for an ash color.

By the way, since hair has no blood supply (except in the root), it can't "get better". Hair's "health" is more of a static problem, not a dynamic one. You can condition all you want, but it will not change the long-term strength of the hair. This seems to be something that 90% of stylists have no clue about. I definitely recommend using conditioners after every shampoo if you color your hair, but expecting to improve the inherent condition of your hair before coloring is not going to happen.