How to Maintain a Grey Hair Transformation at Home

Grey hair transformations can be a great way to break free from coloring your hair brown, red or black. If you are tired of seeing your grey roots grow out every 4-6 weeks and are hoping for lower maintenance hair without the wait of years of growing out color, as a grey tranformation expert I will explain how to protect your investment at home. If you have read my blog: What to Expect with a Grey Hair Transformation", you will see that this process involves a very intense and detailed highlighting process.

Grey Tone Maintenance: Highlighting the hair only lightens the hair to light-medium yellow. A contrasting color (pastel violet or blue-violet) will need to be added to keep the hair looking "grey". To do this your stylist will "tone" the hair with a demi-permanent color. Often it is toned twice to ensure the perfect grey, and also to help with longevity of tone. "Grey" is a pastel color, and with such little pigment being added to the hair, it will fade easily. So how do you prevent having to come in the salon every few washes to re-tone your hair?

1) Violet/purple Shampoo, conditioner, masks, foams or sprays can help maintain the color at home. Which one you use depends on what works best for you. Keep in mind that while these colored products will neutralize the yellow in your hair- if applied to your natural white hair, it will temporarily stain it a light violet. So use what product you can control application of best. Also, use the products recommended by a grey hair specialist to make sure you get the right shade of color for toning. Not all purple shampoos are created equal.

2) Tips and Tricks: Tinted hair products like purple shampoo are also usually formulated more alkaline so that they can stain the hair better. This means that daily use of them can make the hair feel dry and brittle. I would suggest using tinted shampoos and conditioners no more than every 3-4 washes. If you are using a product that you need to rinse out of the hair- make sure to thoroughly wash your hair with a non-tinting gentle cleansing shampoo first. Then apply the tinted Shampoo, conditioner, or whatever tinted product and let sit for 5-10 mins so the color has time to stain the hair before rinsing.

How to Prevent Dry Brittle Hair: To remove years of permanent or demi-permanent color from the hair, it may require lots of color removal and intense bleaching of the hair. This means the lipids and proteins in the hair will be broken down leaving the hair dry and brittle if these are not replaced each wash.

1) Leave In Conditioner: Ask your hairstylist what leave in conditioner they recommend to help prevent this as much as possible. Think of haircare like skincare. If you had an intense chemical peel- you wouldn't wash your face without applying a moisturizer would you? Each time you wash your hair the moisture also needs to be replenished or you will be dealing with a lot of breakage. Sometimes you need a spray and cream conditioner. Sprays help detangle to prevent breaking your hair when brushing it wet, and a cream can be a more intensive moisturizer.

2) Regular trims: Plan on trimming your hair a 1/2" to 1" every 12 weeks until the color has grown out. prioritize health over length since unhealthy hair will choose to break off and may cause more breakage along the way.

How to Prevent your grey highlights from turning yellow: To prevent your toner from fading as much as possible:

1) Try to wash your hair as little as possible. If you wash your hair every day, a grey transformation with a lot of highlights can be a bad idea as this may just dry your hair out too much. If water made the Grand Canyon- it can also manually rinse the color out of your hair

2) Use a gentle color safe shampoo to try to prevent the color from fading. This is what you will use most wash days.

3) Turn down the heat on your hot tools to 360 or below and use a heat protectant. Heat protectant only protects the hair 100 percent up to 250 degrees, higher than that and the heat protection is lower. Heat will burn off the grey color, and straight up burn your hair causing it to appear dark yellow. You can burn naturally white hair and turn it yellow too! I would recommend avoiding flat ironing your hair, and using a blow dryer to smooth the hair since it is usually less heat. Hot rollers are also a great heat alternative as they are low enough heat that they wont burn your fingers or your hair and can be a great styling tool.

I hope you enjoyed the tips for maintaining your grey color at home! If you also had lowlights done to mimic the "pepper" or dark grey in your hair- the best you can do is try not to fade this color. Since it is a darker color it usually lasts longer. However the lowlight tone can only be maintained in salon by your stylist. This is done with the darker lowlights being picked out so that they can be toned separately from the light grey highlights. This is more time consuming and will be more expensive than just an all over toner service.