Is home dying the answer?

Changing your hair is what every girl desires once and a while and colour is not only a dramatic change but also very hard to get right.  So do you pay out for salon quality or can you get just as good results from a home dying kit?

It is well know that a salon dye will cost on average around £60, obviously depending on where you go and what colours you choose.  When asking the women of Kent what their views were on home dying the answers were quite controversial. 

A home dye kit can cost as much as £10 these days (hardly breaking the bank) so if your going for a block colour and its near your natural shade then hopefully the results will be spot on.  Even so, a salon dye is a safer option and your more than likely to be guaranteed the colour your after, however this is not always the case.  Hannah Atterbury, a student from Canterbury, said:


"I think its okay for brunettes to home dye but for blondes, bleach can go horribly wrong.  Although, in my case, I came out ginger after going to the salon and asking for my usual bleached blonde hair.  The hairdresser who corrected it for me, told me that bleach in home dye kits is not as strong as salon quality, which is why the colour will look tacky".


Where as Jodie Phillips, a student at Canterbury, has a light blonde shade to her hair.  She says she uses Clairol's 'nice and easy' home dying kit, a shade called 'ultra light summer blonde' and has never had any problems with it. 


So even salons can mess up the colouring sometimes.  However Rachael Hedgecock, a hairdresser from DooDas in Maidstone, is concerned about the health of the hair when home dying goes wrong:


"It is 100% better to get it coloured professionally, if you use consumer products you get consumer results, if u use professional colour u get professional results. No one really knows  what they are doing when they do it themselves, so 9 times out of 10 they cause damage to their hair from over processing, or do not get the results they are after. It's so common that people come into salons to get their hair corrected because they have coloured it themselves. This then makes it really hard for a hairdresser to put right as we don't always know what has been used on the hair, and if we are going to cause further damage.  It's frustrating at the amount of people who colour their hair at home before hand."


Even still, if you are happy with the colour that results from a home dye, then why spend more? 


Becca Woodford, a secretary in Canterbury, has beautiful red hair, and guess what, it's from a bottle!  

She has been using XXL live for a couple of years now.  Heres what Becca had to say about home dying:


"I dye my own hair and I always have done! With my red colour, I first used it on dark brown hair, so it came out a dark red, but the more you dye it, the lighter it goes.  Because I’ve been doing it for ages it takes well and goes quite red, so it’s about being persistent".

And when asked if she would recommend home dying:

"I would recommend it because salons use semi permanent so you go back more and pay more often where as XXL is permanent.  So yes I would recommend paying £4 rather than £60 any day!"