Whenever hair is dyed or highlighted, using the proper toning shampoo helps keep brassiness at bay. Similar to the toner that your stylist might apply at the salon to help supercharge your journey on the "road to silver," a toning shampoo can help keep things cool or warm, depending on your objective.
Apply Hair Color With Foils
If you're trying to transition to gray hair, you want to avoid an all-over dye job. Instead, have your colorist apply your hair color with foils — much like applying highlights, except you won't be lightening your hair. This will simply help you transition between the two shades seamlessly.
There are basically 3 main ways to transition to naturally gray hair: to let it grow as it is and be patient (a.k.a the “cold turkey” method), to cut your hair very short and regrow it fully gray, or ask your hair colorist to blend your grays with the dyed hair color.
For those wanting to embrace greys with dark hair, Bradbury recommends lowlight foils over highlights. “Instead of putting pieces of lighter colour through the hair, we put pieces of darker colour through the hair. This can create a shadowy effect to break up the regrowth line where your greys will come through.”
Can Gray Hair Be Highlighted? Yes, gray hair can be highlighted. Just keep in mind that, when you're highlighting gray locks, the goal is to blend silver strays and create an ultra-natural finish.
We suggest opting for an all-over color service if you want to fully mask every gray hair on your head with a uniform shade. However, highlighting may be better if your goal is to blend your grays seamlessly.
The most popular easy ways to disguise the grays among women are blonde highlights, silver balayage, soft lowlights, icy and ashy hair dyes, red and brown colors.
Gray blending is a subtle hair color application that oscillates between highlights and balayage. Like a game of chiaroscuro, the colorist will first lighten large sections of hair with a light balayage, then accentuate the effect on a few finer strands to blend in the gray hair naturally present.
If your hair is blonde, blend grays using highlights and lowlights. Lee says light-haired folks "have an easier time covering grays because they can camouflage the gray with the blonde through highlights, lowlights, and babylights." Lee explains these techniques are the most natural-looking option for covering grays " ...
For grey hair coverage, we generally recommend that you aim to color slightly lighter than the natural hair color level of your client. In this case we would suggest you go for a color starting in level 6 (Dark Blonde) or 7 (Blonde).
Lowlights, which, unlike highlights are actually a few shades darker than your hair, bring out the most natural look versus using brighter traditional highlights, says Michael Canalé, Jennifer Aniston's longtime colorist and creator of hair care line Canalé.
Choose a tinted gloss to correct your highlights, or a clear gloss to add shine. Use a root concealer for a temporary fix. Grey root concealers come in spray, stick, or powder form. Apply a root concealer to your roots and let it dry or set if needed.
Typically, white people start going gray in their mid-30s, Asians in their late 30s, and Blacks in their mid-40s. Half of all people have a significant amount of gray hair by the time they turn 50.
What Happens When You Put Bleach On Gray Hair? Bleaching gray areas of your hair will not show any visible difference. However, the bleaching mix helps lighten the hair that is still dark. This imparts a uniform blonde or white look to your hair, based on how long you leave the bleach mix.
Be patient with the process.
Aside from the time investment of a salon session, there's how long it takes to fully transition to gray hair, which is anywhere from six months to a year, Ferrara says. "Some people won't have the patience, so they choose to color their hair again," she notes.
Silver, ashy, blond, and platinum are indeed the most popular hair color choices for women over 60. And with good reason! Instead of coloring to hide your grey hair, you can choose to embrace it. I've seen way too many women with poorly colored dark brown hair color that just doesn't look natural or flattering.
The easiest and fastest way to go gray is to get your hair buzzed very short. If that's too drastic for you, a pixie cut is the preferred route for many women.
Gray Magic adds concentrate red and yellow with wetting agents to replace the lost color pigment and moisture, to 'lock-in' hair color. When added to shampoos or conditioners, will prevent fading and oxidtation for tinted red or warm colors (10 drops per ounce of shampoo or conditioner).
Pink is one of those colors that works really beautifully with gray hair. Hot pink, dusky rose, light pink – try them out and see how you like them!
When you've gone gray, or white, or salt-and-pepper, your skin can look washed-out and dull. So use a luminizing, moisturizing foundation, and apply powder only where you absolutely need it, says New York City makeup artist Mally Roncal. It makes every complexion more vibrant, says Roncal.
A Sprinkling of Silver.
Dark hair with silver gray highlights is such a chic way to transform your style. Try this balayage color on longer hair to get the full transitions of color.
Balayage is a smart solution for gray hair because it allows the colorist to specifically target gray strands without touching the scalp. And, because you don't need to do a single process to cancel out a few grays, it's easier on your hair overall.