The Gray hair trend has been popping up on the scene for a couple of years now. It made a strong impact on the beauty world as men and woman alike took to the bottle to achieve the look that so many have resisted for years.
As I watched countless videos on the process of obtaining the elusive perfect shiny, silvery gray hair, I found that achieving the sought after before Mother Nature said it was due, was just as difficult, if not more so, than trying to cover it when it was your time.
The good thing for all those who bleached their hair to the high heavens to then plop on layers of silver, lavender and icy blue, is that once the trend dies, reversing the color of their hair will be easy. Take a darker color and BAM! Back to black you go.
Unfortunately, for those who are graying because of Mother Nature, it won’t be so easy to reverse the look the gray hair gives them.
Dying gray hair is the option most women go for. It’s the easiest and most convenient thing available to us today. If you don’t want to be gray, you simply dye your hair, right? Wrong! You can dye it, but it probably won’t be so simple.
Gray hair is notoriously resistant to dye. Ask any woman who had dealt with trying to cover them and she will tell you that the struggle is too real. There are even hair dyes on the market which are specifically designed to tackle the issues that gray hair presents when you try to color it.
There are many factors that contribute to the resistance of gray hair, and below are 4 of the main ones. Hopefully understanding these factors will help you if you need to tackle your grays with a bottle of dye.
Gray hair is coarse
Hair doesn’t actually turn gray. What happens is that it stops producing melanin which pigments the strands. As this happens, oils* present in melanin are also lost. The lack of oils* causes the newly gray strands to become dryer and more brittle than the strands of hair that haven’t grayed.
Over time the dryer stands become coarse. Color has to penetrate coarse hair on a deeper level in order for the pigment to fully adhere to the strands. This makes a typical dye job much more complicated.
Who else? <3makeup ? Think there are plenty like me
If grey(dead) hair resists color, explain how it takes the color better than your live(not grey)hair?? Huh?
You don’t “dye” hair.
Some grey hair is really resistant. Your have to color twice at times. Or use double neutral
One thing that was missed, is that you have to alter what color you use once you get over 50% gray. For instance, let’s say you color your hair a light or medium auburn (a coppery red-brown). When you have more gray, those strands will look a golden red color, like a strawberry blonde almost, when you use the same color, because the base pigment is missing from your natural hair, which in this case we will say was a dark brown. To get the same result you used to get, you need to add back those base pigments. In this case when you color your 50% or more gray hair, you would use 1/2 bottle of the color you have been using, and 1/2 of a dark warm brown color which closely resembles what your natural color once was, and one of the bottles of developer from your kits. You would save the other developer and the two half bottles of color for your next touch up. I learned this when I was a cosmetologist, and used it on my mom, whose hair was almost 100% gray, when I finally got her away from coloring her hair black. Her hair looked much like mine did, and mine was dark brown, colored a medium auburn color.
Someone mentioned gray hair being dead and pigmented hair being live; all hair is dead once it sprouts from your scalp.
I agree gray hair is very resistant-the outer cuticle layer lays very flat to the shaft, because there is no longer any pigment inside (melanin) to prevent the cuticle from closing completely. An alternative to coloring twice is to use a 10 volume peroxide to pretreat the hair or new growth before you color it-this helps lift the cuticle some to let the new pigment in.
Pretty hair
I want something that is permanent for good and I do not have to do my hair every 6-8weeks
I got tired of putting color on my hair every two weeks because I didn’t like seeing gray roots and edges. So I embraced my gray hair but it look better with a perm for now. After it grow some more I might try being natural.
Maybe because you don’t embrace the fact that aging comes with it. No need of reversing it.
wonderful
Beautiful
I refuse to dye my gray hair.