"My friend thought it was odd that I was in my 20s and had never dyed my hair, and kept pressuring me to do it. I finally made a deal with her: I would dye my hair if she would dye hers — and let me choose her color. She agreed, and I chose to color her platinum-blond hair a nice auburn. I followed all the instructions carefully, but became a little nervous as I was rinsing her hair out. The color was more like a fruit-punch shade of red. I wouldn’t let her look in the mirror and was hoping that it would look different after we dried her hair; unfortunately, this only made matters worse. Then her boyfriend dropped by, and of course he went crazy. He told her it looked ridiculous, and she went to the mirror and flipped out. I felt awful!"
J.V., Brookline
Ah, home coloring gone awry. It’s something every middle-schooler wrestles with at some point, but it’s markedly more traumatic when adults make the mistake. Samantha Hulslander, a stylist at James Joseph Salon (30 Newbury Street, Boston, 617.266.7222), has seen her fair share of these mishaps. “A lot of things can go wrong when you do at-home coloring, and that is clearly one of them,” says Hulslander of J.V.’s experience. The problem is, boxed color isn’t formulated for one person’s specific hair type; its “Dirty Blondes” and “Chocolate Browns” are too general for wide-ranging success. J.V.’s friend’s hair could also have some inconsistencies — perhaps it was bleached blond at the roots but brassy at the tips — that might cause the dye to absorb differently in different parts of the hair. A professional stylist, of course, could account for that sort of thing when mixing color. To fix the situation, Hulslander would put a base pigment back in the hair; then she’d apply the appropriate color on top.
Note to those still considering drugstore color: according to Hulslander, red is one of the hardest hues to get right. It fades easily, which necessitates starting with a strong color base before the red tones are added. And, obviously, it’s easy to end up with something unintentionally candy-colored.