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Color Treated Hair-Hair Care Tips

houseofebbittsalon
Apr 8, 2018
5 min read

How To Make Your Hair Color Treatment Last! is the most recent of the thousands of beauty-related articles you can find online that I sat down to read. After all, beauty is my obsession. However, after just a paragraph I had to put the computer mouse down and take a breath. We all need advice on how to protect our new hair color. But honestly there are a lot of hair care tips for color treated hair out there, and a lot of it is either so general that it it not at all helpful, or else just terrible advice that you should do your best to ignore entirely.

For example: There is no doubt that if you dye your hair, particularly if you have a high maintenance hair color like red, you should take steps to preserve it. After all, your hair color should to be lush and vibrant right up until the next time you color your hair. Anything else is unacceptable.

The most common tip for color treated hair suggests using shampoos and conditioners formulated for color treated hair. Well, yes, that's true but which brand of shampoo? Are ALL of them good? Aren't some better than others? YES! In fact, many of the shampoos supposedly formulated for color treated hair that are currently available in drugstores, even many of the shampoo brands in beauty supply stores, will still hurt your hair color and leave your locks dry and prone to breakage. Let's face it - brand matters. I have spent a lot of money on supposedly color-protecting shampoos that ultimate compromised my color and the health of my hair.

So, after a lot of disappointment and a lot of broken hair, I recommend only two brands of shampoo - out of ALL of them -Rene Furterer and Kerastase.

I have field-tested so many hair products on my own color treated head for quite some time now. Every single other brand - cheap or expensive, including the popular non-sulphate, no-poo shampoos, have all hurt my color-treated hair in one way or another. So I am sticking with these bad boys.

If you try to save money on your shampoo, thinking you will fix it in the conditioning it will backfire. Inferior ingredients will scrub away part of the pigment in your color treated hair. Your blonde hair will go brassy, your golden brown hair will go ashy, and your red will just fade away, or worse, turn pink. In addition to messing up your color these shampoos can be drying which causes frizz, which dulls your hair color further. So now you have to fix the frizzy ends with some kind of silicone-based gloss AND fix the color. More money spent, more time wasted.

Rene Fuhrterer is the brand my Beverly Hills colorist turned me on to when I lived there. And it is the only brand my current (and wonderful) hair colorist in Annapolis recommends or carries.

And here’s my point. Really good colorists - those who take pride their work- will put the outcome of their client’s hair color far above the interests of whatever salon they might work in. So don’t think that they are just going to sell you whatever brand they carry. High-end hair salon’s choose to carry the high end brands they do for a reason. These brands make their stylist’s work look good.

Now here is a hair tip for color treated hair to file under "advice you should NOT follow": the idiotic advice that when your color fades you should just go out and buy some random bottle of shampoo or conditioner that will “deposit a little color on the ends of your hair” Really? What color? Does it go with the shade of brown or red that you already have? What is the color base? What about your expensive highlights, what color are they going to turn? Green? Pink? Orange? Yellow?

Bottom line - it could work for some people's color, but certainly not if you have any kind of Ombre, Sombre or any balayage or ANY highlights at all. It also wont work if you have contrasting roots, and it only might work if you have one-process, bottle color. Me, I have never seen it turn out well.

Instead, have your colorist create for you a custom bottle of color-added shampoo, combining a really great brand of shampoo with your special formula of hair color. This way you will not have a color war on your head! If that is not something they do, then make sure they tone your ends with your color formula mixed with 5% peroxide every few weeks.

And that leads to another important hair tip; if you do your own color, you should never pull the color through to the ends after the first time - it destroys your hair and makes the lengths too porous. Once that happens the color takes differently on the damaged ends than it does on the fresher part closer to the head. Usually this means the hair goes darker and duller as it gets closer to the ends. It's incredibly aging. So to avoid this, buy a second bottle of your color and mix it with 5% peroxide (not the peroxide it comes with) and add this mixture to the ends about 5-10 minutes before washing it all out.

I also recommend supplementing conditioner with hair masques – leave-in conditioners - every few washes to give your hair added shine and protection. Here are three products I recommend highly.

I love the Kerastas line almost as much as I do Rene Furterer, and Living Proof is another excellent and affordable product. Remember, hair is not something you can actually repair. You can either prevent problems, mask problems or chop them off. There is no real fix for damaged hair, so prevention is the better part of valor.

With that in mind, understand that a flatiron in the wrong hands (usually yours) is terrible for your hair. You may think you are sealing the ends when you are actually burning them. The same goes for curling irons and, to a lesser extent, blow dryers. Technique is important, but absent that, it is very important that when you are using any heat styling instruments on your colored locks (and who does not) you must use a heat styling protectant on your hair. Renee Fuhrter makes a superb one but there are several other brands I can happily recommend including Matrix, TreSemme and Joico’s K-Pack Protective hairspray, which is a fantastic multi-tasker that works both as a heat protectant and medium-hold hairspray, which gives hair lots of volume.

If you are a little lazy, you will love this next tip! Try not to wash and blow out your hair too much. If you hit the gym a lot this can be a little tricky, and that is where dry shampoo becomes your best friend. It actually adds texture and makes your hair smell very pretty between washes. I have to admit once again to my Renee Furterer obsession here because I love how it makes my hair smell as well as how effective it is. But there are again several excellent brands of dry shampoo to choose from, that do a great job, including Bumble and Bumble Pret A Powder, DRYBAR Detox Dry Shampoo and Living Proof Perfect Hair Day Dry Shampoo.

To sum it up: if you want your hair color to go on evenly and look shiny, rich and dimensional from shampoo to shampoo, then treat your hair very, very well. Shampoo, condition, protect and style using high end product with great ingredients that won’t cause skin reactions, dryness, and split ends.. Beef up the color between salon visits with a color depositing shampoo formulated just for you by your colorist. And then expect longer lasting color, great shine and smooth texture in return.