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pinkstars · May 23, 2009, 12:19 AM

Hi everyone~

My original hair color is black, but it has been colored many times before - I want a LIGHT BROWN at this point..

Many people told me to bleach it up to a yellow and then go over it with a light brown dye. Is that right? Because that seems a bit excessive just to reach a light brown shade..

Right now my hair has been bleached to a strawberry blonde, but a few strands and the roots border on yellow.

I was wondering if I could just use a light ash brown dye to get rid of the orange, but I worry that the yellow parts might go green? Or could I add warmer tones to the yellow parts before using a light ash brown all over?

I'm really not sure what step I should take next... :(
Any advice would be greatly appreciated..

Perito · May 23, 2009, 04:18 AM

My original hair color is black, but it has been colored many times before - I want a LIGHT BROWN at this point..

Many people told me to bleach it up to a yellow and then go over it with a light brown dye. <wrong>

Right now my hair has been bleached to a strawberry blonde, but a few strands and the roots border on yellow.

I was wondering if I could just use a light ash brown dye to get rid of the orange, but I worry that the yellow parts might go green? Or could I add warmer tones to the yellow parts before using a light ash brown all over?

If your hair is currently lighter than light brown, you can use a light ash brown dye. You can add some red into the mix if you're afraid that it will go green. You can also mix a little of the dye with some red and put that only on the yellow parts or you can touch up greenish spots with some red dye later on. When going from blonde to brown, you need to add red (red + green = brown) but you don't want it yellow. Yellow contains no red. Formulators assume that the undertones will be red so they put a lot of green in brown dyes (the darker brown, the more green).

If you hair were darker than the light brown you want, you would use color remover to remove the artificial dye and then recolor or bleach and recolor. Bleach doesn't lighten artificial pigment like it does natural pigment, and you usually end up with a mess. That's why bleach is a bad idea on already-colored hair.