The Brunette-to-Blonde Switcheroo

Fri, 7 September 2012 12:46PM

Why, when you want to lighten hair from brunette to blonde, do hairdressers tell you to do it ‘gradually’?

Well, you could go blonde in one hit… Say, a bleach followed by a toner to get the shade of blonde you want. However, not many colourists would recommend this due to the damage it would inflict on your hair’s condition – unless perhaps, you’re also getting your hair cut quite short (in which case such damage would be less, as well as less obvious).

The main reason colourists advise a gradual approach is to get the final colour right. Going from brunette to blonde is the trickiest shade change, and the blonde can end up throwing a lot of warm (as Miranda Kerr told us the other day). The most flattering blonde for natural brunettes tends to be one that is a tone-on-tone mix of honey and caramel shades. The blonde highlights themselves might still throw some red, but when they’re mixed with deeper-hued sections of hair, they’re cooled down. Case in point: Emily Blunt, who has gone blonde in a few steps over the past couple of months.

To achieve this change, your first session might be to use a product that lifts colour all over (for example, Joico has one called Vero K-Pak Base Breaker). At the next appointment, you might then have a half-head of highlights (or more) to get closer to your wish-list colour. And finally, you’d go back for any corrective highlights, as well as perhaps some balayage. If you did all this at once, you would lose total control of the final colour. Not to mention give your hair an intense damage dose all at once. But if you do this over a few months, as Emily has done, you can add in treatments along the way to keep harm to a minimum.

 

But let’s also ask the other Primpers … has anyone else gone from brunette to blonde, and lived to tell the tale?

Posted by: Katrina Lawrence

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Tags: balayage, blonde, brunette, emily blunt, hair colour