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Highlight Hair at home, very little margin for error

My heart breaks every time I read the comments on my blog in the highlight hair coloring posts particularly those about highlighting hair and the disasters that stem from attempting to do hair highlighting or lowlights at home. Just don’t do it! It is a disaster waiting to happen, your chances of success are minimal at best. Even in the hands of a professional highlighting hair can be trickyEven in the hands of a professional highlighting hair can be tricky. My recommendation is that if you cannot afford to have it done professionally . . . don’t do it until you can.

The problem is two fold in that, by trying to save a few bucks by higlight hair at home, you can easily end up with a problem only redeemable by paying $100 or more to get it repaired in a hair salon. If money is a factor, go to a hair styling school in your area. They will do much better than you would ever be able to do yourself. The instructors will overlook and advise the student hair stylist doing the corrective coloring of the right hair color formula and application needed.

I choose a topic from time to time from the comment section that I think will be of interest to most of my readers, Here is such a comment:

I’m making a post from your comment Ursh, because it mirrors the problems of many do-it-yourselfers who attempt to highlight hair at home.

The best recommendation for you, at this point, is to have a professional fix it. They will need to see your hair, before being able to tell you how much it will cost. Believe me, at this point, you will only make it worse by trying to fix it yourself.

So, why would a medium golden brown hair color turn out copper? The answer lies in what color your hair was to begin with and if there was any hair highlights in it. In retail hair coloring products, if you had golden shades or gray in your hair, a medium golden brown, will pull up reddish tones.

Now for the second part of your question; what do I have to do in order for the color to get to the ends?

You already realize the color you used had no effect on the ends. You will need a different formula to lighten the ends of your hair because they are a different color than the highlight hair at the roots. Not only that, it will need to be matched to the color you have on the roots, and carefully applied as to not overlap onto the already colored roots. Does that make sense?

You can see it gets touchy!

I understand wanting to highlight hair at home, I did it too, before I had professional experience, but my best advice to you is this:

1. Leave highlight hair, lowlighting, or major color changes to the professionals.

2. Start slow with home color, use, tone on tone, no peroxide colors and semi-permanent colors. Make no major hair color changes, using home hair color, unless you have experience.

3. Read all directions.

4. Do a strand test (this would have prevented the above problem)

Got a question, war story or comment about this topic? Click on the "Leave Your Comments" link at the very bottom of this article. Some of my best ideas for future articles come from reading reader comments. I'd love to hear from you!

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