Keeping Your Blonde Bright Not Brassy

As a on-again-off-again blonde, I know all about the difficulties of keeping your hair looking salon (or at home color) fresh.

Blonde hair tends to get brassy the longer you go between dye jobs/refreshing your color, which is really annoying when you’re fair-skinned like me and look horrible in brassy tones or just happen to want icy, platinum blonde hair. So here’s my tip on staying brassless on the cheap and easy:

Born Blonde Semi-Permanent Toner by Clairol. It’s available at Sally’s Beauty Supply, costs $10.99 and will last you quite a long time. It’s available in eight different shades, so you can choose what subtle shade of blonde you would like. I personally use Innocent Ivory, for very light cool toned blonde hair and if you are close to a white blonde color I would recommend you use that shade as well.

The first thing I like about this toner is that it actually works! I see definite results in my hair whenever I use it and I like those results. I looks less brassy every time I use it. My hair has been put through torture by all my dyeing and bleaching at this point, and for it to look as nice as it does is largely due to the toner.

Draco most definitely is using a toner on the regular. I mean, look at that hair, it is icy perfection!

Secondly, I just combine some of the toner, which has a nice slightly creamy consistency, with my conditioner whenever I wash my hair, leave it and the conditioner on for a few minutes, and rinse it out. This makes for an incredibly easy process as well as I can combine it with which ever conditioner I happen to be using that day. And, if you feel you need a more intense tone up, than you can put it in your hair all by itself and leave it on up to about 30 minutes. Be careful how long you leave the toner on though, do spot checks to see how it’s turning out after it’s been on longer than ten minutes because depending on your hair condition and color if you leave the toner on too long your hair can take a little too much of the toner’s color and you might get a slightly violet cast to your hair until you’ve washed it out a few times.

Ad for John Frieda's Color Renew shampoo and conditioner. Picture courtesy of John Frieda.

Now, you could of course buy a shampoo and conditioner that will keep the brass away, John Frieda offers a drug store version of this called Color Renew and there are a few brands at Sally’s Beauty Supply that do this as well, but from my experience I’ve found just using the toner itself works better. Not to mention I don’t have to ditch my favorite shampoos and conditioners just because it wasn’t made specifically for blondes every time I go back to the hair color Motherland.

Do you have any tips on keeping your blonde hair looking fresh?

Beautiful Crinkly Hair

Cynthia Rowley’s Fall 2010 collection at New York Fashion Week went down the runway featuring some serious texture in the clothing and in the hair. While the collection itself is pretty cool (though I’ll admit I think I’m more keen on the clothing in the Spring 2010 collection ), I’m more interested in the hair.

All the models had very texturized long, low ponytail with bits of crimped and colored extensions weaved in with their natural hair color.

Picture from Hair on the Brain. Click to go to source.

Hair on the Brain, a really great hair-centric blog I follow, has the scoop on the look, go check it out for a step-by-step as well as a step-by-step of DKNY’s collection’s hair as well.

I love how the hair looked on the runway, Cynthia Rowley described this collection as  a “chic monster-girl collection.” This hair seems appropriate to that description as well as actually very wearable since those colored bits are extensions which you could switch in and out if you got the clip-in kind.

Picture from Hair on the Brain. Click to go to source.

I love the idea of crimping the extensions, it’s unusual and really amps up the interest. Just make sure if you try this out you get some REAL hair wefts (you can buy those at Sally’s Beauty Supplies along with clips that you can sew to the ends of the wefts to turn them into clip-in extensions) so that when you crimp the hair it doesn’t melt. Synthetic hair CANNOT be heat-treated, it’s plastic and proves that once the heat is on by shriveling up and burning.

Picture from Hair on the Brain. Click to go to source.

Also, I suggest you do what Wella (the brand responsible for hair at this show) did and dye the extensions yourself for a customized look. They went with really saturated jewel tones for this show, but I think I’d like to do some pretty pastel streaks if I were to give it a go!

Any looks you particularly liked from New York Fashion week on or off the runway? Share ‘em!