This tutorial will show you how to make your own purple shampoo to use as a DIY hair toner to banish those brassy shades. It works on both bleach lightened hair and natural blonde locks.
Being blonde isn’t always easy. Achieving that perfect tone can sometimes take a lot of time and be costly, not to mention damaging to your hair.
Whether you’re a natural blonde or you lighten your hair, those yellow, brassy tones can pop up and throw off your whole look.
Enter: this incredible, quick and easy DIY hair toner.
How to get rid of yellow roots?
Toner is what you would normally use to remove any unwanted yellow or orange hues left in your hair after lightening.
With regrowth, toning for me is a must. Toning your hair is a final step that is needed to brighten your blonde and banish that yellow.
What is a hair toner?
A hair toner is a product that doesn’t alter the colour of your hair (nor take any colour away), but simply adds a tone on top of your existing shade. You can think of it as an “adjuster” in that it can help correct or adjust your hair colour by offsetting unwanted pigments.
In the salon, your stylist will apply an oxidative toner to finish off your colouring job. Oxidative toners are usually mixed with peroxide to help you achieve the result you like, but they can be damaging to your hair… especially if you bleach the crap out of it like me.
Luckily, there are safe, non-damaging, and at home methods to getting a result you are happy with!
Why a DIY purple toner works
Purple dyes or even purple shampoos are opposite yellow on the colour wheel. If you know anything about colour theory, purple and yellow are complimentary colours. When combined, the hues from the purple help cancel out the brightness of the yellow, leaving you with a cooler tone.
Since purple cancels out yellow, finding the right balance between the two will leave you with a natural, more neutral tone.
If your hair is more orange instead of yellow, you should try using a blue dye or blue shampoo instead, for the same reason being that blue and orange are complimentary colours.
The ingredients
- Any cheap conditioner of your choice
- A semi-permanent ammonia and peroxide free hair colour in a violet shade, like Manic Panic Ultra Violet cream hair colour, or my other favourite, Pravana Chromasilk Vivids in Silver
- Application brush
How to make your DIY hair toner
Squirt a bunch of conditioner into a bowl. Use as much as you think will be needed to cover your head.
Using the brush, grab a glob of the purple dye and start mixing it into the conditioner. You only need a little bit! I usually do two globs of the same amount as shown in the above photo.
The shade should be a light to medium purple.
With your brush, start applying it to your roots, sectioning off rows and coating both the top and underside as you go. You can do this to wet OR dry hair! The conditioner is great for your hair as well!
Continue the process all over your head until all of your roots are covered. If you want to, you can massage the leftovers into the rest of your hair for even coverage.
I left my ends free because they were already the shade I wanted.
Let the mixture sit on your head for about an hour. You can check it every 10 minutes or so to make sure it’s coming along nicely.
If you leave it on too long or use too much purple, you run the risk of turning your hair lilac, so the processing time will depend on your own hair.
Finally, rinse it out, but don’t shampoo. Since this is a semi-permanent colour, the more you wash your hair with shampoo, the more the colour you’ve added will fade.
You can repeat the process whenever you feel a little too brassy!
I recommend keeping a little bottle of your mixture in your shower and washing with it every couple of weeks to keep the tone fresh!
Now you can sit back and relax without worrying about your hair casting awful hues!
Update:
I created a video showing you how I touch up my hair and create a DIY silver toner. Watch it here:
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