I have been dying my hair black at home for a year now and want to return to my natural colour of light brown. My local salon says there is no way of doing this and i will have to grow the colour out. But my hair is long and this will take years and will look dreadful!

HELP!!!!!

Well your local salon is wrong. Its more a question of how much damage it will be to bleach it outand recolor w/ a shade matching ur natural color. But w/ that said, what you should do is find another salon in your area, with a good colorist that can remove it w/ a color remover or bleach it, but bleaching is extremely harsh esp. when trying to remove black. There's only one good reason that i can think of as to why ur salon says it "can't be done" and that's if you've been coloring ur hair w/ Feria black. (That's becuz it's a metallic dye which would make the bleaching/removing process extremely tricky)

If you want to, you can go to your local beauty supply and get l'oreal Colorfix to remove the black, but be aware that it might take more than once to take out the color. From there u can recolor in a light (ash) brown, becuz ash counteracts any orange tones that might appear in the hair. I suggest clairol complement color, w/ 10 vol. developer if ur just depositing.

I would NOT, however, advise you to bleach it urself at home. This is best left to the professionals. If you do call up another salon, ask them if they have Igora Modulat. Its supposed to be a less harsh color remover that takes out permanent and semi- hair color w/ out bleach or peroxide. Btw, u haven't mentioned whether the color on ur hair is semi-permanent or permanent. There is also a gentler method of stripping the dye from ur hair by pulling it through a soap cap; this involves mixing bleach and shampoo at leaving it on ur hair for a small amt of time, and then washing it off. Though this most likely will not take out all the build up of black dye in ur hair.

Also, in the mean time, u could use an anti-dandruff shampoo like Head&Shoulders to "fade" the black in ur hair somewht. A lot of pple like to use Prell in this situation, but it strips ur hair of all the moisture.

It's best to look for a salon that has good colorists really knowledgable and they should be able to get u back to light brwn w/ out too much damage. Well good luck.

Thanks for your reply!

Further to your question i have been dying my hair with a permanent black colour by nice & easy - clairol for a year.

If i ordered Colorfix - what would be a good plan of action as regards using it? I live in a very rural area and to be honest there are no good salons around - certainly none that would be clued up about doing this. If i put colorfix on my hair (after testing it of course) and after it has (hopefully) stripped the color out - what would i do next?

Thanks for the tips! I hope it works.

So if i buy a couple of Colorfix's and use those to lighten as much as i can (bearing in mind it will be orange!) And then put a light brown colour over the top. Would that light brown dye have to be a permanent one?

Thanks so much for all your help!

Thanks for the advice!

just one more question! could you recommend a timescale for doing this? For instance, how long would i have to leave it before doing another colourfix if it takes more than one? And then after having done colorfix can i dye it straight away?

Very important..use a semi-permanent color for depositing...(Veronica is right) don't use permanent.  The hard part about doing this whole process at home is that a lot of times after removing color with a product like colorfix you don't know what your going to end up with until you do it.

Gold? orange? MUddy orange...anyway my only point is it's nice to see your colorfix results and then decide what color you need to deposit in order to have a natural looking "light brown"  Good Luck, let us know.