How To Maintain Colored Hair

Understanding How To Maintain Colored Hair

Walking out of the salon with a perfectly executed balayage or vibrant fashion color is an incredible feeling. However, professional color services are a massive financial investment, and the brutal reality is that your new color begins deteriorating the exact second water touches it.

To deposit color into your hair, a stylist has to use an alkaline developer. This developer violently blasts your hair cuticle completely open, plunges into the cortex, destroys your natural pigment, and replaces it with artificial color molecules.

Because the cuticle was blasted open during the service, chemically colored hair is dramatically more porous than virgin hair. If you are not aggressively locking that cuticle shut at home, those microscopic artificial color molecules will literally bleed out of the hair shaft and wash right down the shower drain.

Our Professional Advice

Maintaining colored hair requires extreme defensive habits. If you alter your washing routine and protect your hair from environmental degradation, you can easily double the longevity of your salon color.

1. The 72-Hour Waiting Period

When your stylist finishes coloring your hair, the cuticle layer is technically closed back down, but the artificial color molecules have not fully oxidized and settled into the cortex.

• Do not wash your hair for a strict 72 hours after leaving the salon. Washing immediately reopens the cuticle before the pigment has firmly gripped the internal proteins, causing massive initial color loss.

2. The Cold Water Mandate

Hot water is the ultimate enemy of colored hair.

• While washing in extremely hot water feels great, the heat physically forces the hair cuticle to violently expand and open, immediately allowing the expensive color molecules to escape into the suds.
• You must train yourself to wash colored hair in lukewarm water, and you critically must finish your conditioning routine with a pure cold-water rinse to shock-seal the cuticle tight.

3. Invest in the Right Defense Tools

Sulfate shampoos are industrial detergents. If you scrub a sulfate formula over porous colored hair, you are going to strip the pigment within a week.

• You must exclusively use professional salon-grade, sulfate-free color-safe shampoos.
• Buy a high-quality UV protectant spray. Just like the sun bleaches color out of outdoor furniture, UV rays will blast the artificial tones right out of your hair in the summer. Spray your hair before leaving the house.

If your color does eventually lose its vibrancy or your blonde turns slightly yellow, do not use a box dye over it. Book an incredibly cost-effective Color Gloss or Toner session to have your exact shade professionally refreshed in under 30 minutes!