Tips on colouring your hair from blonde to darker

I recently abandoned my blonde hair colour… Myself and blonde went hand in hand for years, but last month I decided to take the step over to the dark side. This is what my hair looked like before:

To be frank I was quite worried about doing it, since I always colour my hair myself. I’ve heard horror stories of people colouring their hair from blond to brown and that it turned out a bit green-ish. Not the look I was after!

I have coloured my hair from blonde to brown before, but I’ve never been 100% satisfied. Good thing I’ve now got a sister who’s a hairdresser! :D

Any hairdresser’s advice in this situation would be to go for a colour with red pigments in it. Why? Because it’s needed to balance the colour when going from blonde. Blonde is often quite a cold hue, and going for a cold brown colour then means you’ll end up with a green shimmer. If not straight away then at least after a few washes.

Also, darker colours don’t tend to stick properly on blonde hair, which means it washes out really quickly. Just look at these pictures below. The first one is from the day I coloured my hair – very dark, and quite red.

This second picture is only three weeks after – very washed out! As you can see my hair has almost gone back to blonde after all the washes. And this is supposed to be a permanent colour!

So as you can imagine you’re going to have to colour your hair a couple or a few times from blonde to brown to really get that proper rich brown colour. The first time you’re going to have to go for a colour that has red pigments in it, but the next time you can opt for the same darkness of colour but with less red – if that’s what you prefer.

So, how do you know which hair colour to go for? Cause let’s face it – the colour never turns out the way it looks on the box!

Most hair colour brands use this chart, with 10 being the lightest, and 1 the darkest.

On the hair colour box you’ll usually see two numbers. Look at the first number for the darkness, and the number after the comma for the hue. If it has number 1 or 2 after the comma it means that it’s a cold and ashy hue, if it has a 3 it means it’s gold, and 4 and 5 means it has a warm and more red hue.

When I coloured my hair I used this colour from L'Oreal with the number 6.41 – 6 meaning light brown, and 4 meaning red. The last 1 is quite irrelevant – it just means the red has a slightly cold hue, but it’s still red.

I've now coloured my hair for the second time, this time with a colour called 6.3 - light golden brown - and this is the result!