Brass is most commonly seen on those with dyed or lightened hair but can also appear on those with lighter virgin hair colors (like natural blondes and light browns). These tones often look copper or orange on lightened or highlighted brown hair and skew more yellow on cool-toned blonde, white, and gray hair.
Oxidation: Over time, blonde hair can oxidize due to exposure to air, sunlight, and environmental pollutants, leading to a brassy appearance. Water Quality: Hard water contains minerals like iron and copper, which can react with hair dye and cause discoloration.
If you were a blonde to start with and you've ended up with orange hair after bleaching, it could be due to a build-up of chemicals or minerals in your hair. Brassiness can also happen if you've been in the sea or a chlorinated pool frequently.
Neutralize the Tone: To cover copper, consider using a hair dye with ash or neutral tones, as these can help counteract the warmth of copper. Look for colors like ash brown or ash blonde. Darker Shades: If you're looking to go darker, a rich brown or even black can effectively cover copper tones.
Oxidation: Over time, blonde hair can oxidize due to exposure to air, sunlight, and environmental pollutants, leading to a brassy appearance. Water Quality: Hard water contains minerals like iron and copper, which can react with hair dye and cause discoloration.
When you lighten your hair, your natural hair color is lifted to make room for the new color. Because all hair has some measure of underlying warmth, the removal of your natural hue makes yellow, orange or red tones more evident. These tones become visible when bleaching does not fully remove the underlying pigment.
TRY AN ANTI-BRASS PURPLE HAIR MASK
In addition to purple shampoo and conditioner for daily care, integrating an ultra-pigmented purple hair mask like Redken's Blondage Express Anti-Brass hair mask can help transform your blonde from brassy to cool and bright in just 5 minutes.
As you can probably imagine, blue shampoo contains cobalt-colored pigments that help offset orange and other copper-leaning tones. Use it in place of your regular shampoo once or twice a week to help fend off unwanted warmth.
Blue shampoos contain blue or violet pigments; when you wash your hair with blue shampoo, these pigments are deposited onto your hair strands, and help to counteract brassy tones. Use our Blue Crush Shampoo and Blue Crush Conditioner to get rid of those orangey, reddy hues, and reveal cooler-toned brown hair.
Orange or brassy tones are best neutralized with blue, while red tones find their match in green. OVERTONE offers a range of award-winning Coloring Conditioners as well as Toning Conditioners designed specifically for these correction needs.
Bad highlights are streaks of uneven color, too much brightness, or poor results in the hair. These can be caused by DIY attempts, inexperienced stylists, or a misunderstanding of the desired result. Bad picks can make your hair look unnatural and unflattering.
Hair may turn orange for several reasons including high-mineral or chlorinated water, frequent sun exposure, high-sulfate and high-chemical products that can strip the hair, or simply lifting out melanin in a color treatment and revealing naturally existent undertones.
Blue is the main colour that cancels out orange brassiness. If you think back to art class you might remember the colour wheel, where we learnt but colours opposite from each other on the wheel cancel each other out. This is also true with hair.
Copper is such a rich vibrant colour so can fade quickly. Reds will fade to a copper & copper will fade golden appearing lighter & lighter.
Blue shampoo: Neutralizes unwanted orange, red and copper tones that shows up in lightened hair.
And because those UV rays are stronger in summer compared to other times of the year, some strands will turn a copper red colour due to the underlying warmer tones in your brunette hair being revealed as it's bleached by the light. Suffice it to say, until new hair grows through, the reddish tint will remain.
Purple toners are the best for brassy blonde hair! As a blonde, if you're seeing brass you're likely seeing unwanted yellow - and purple counteracts this.
So if you bleached your hair and it came out more yellow, you'll likely need to use a purple toner before going in with your purple shampoo to neutralize the yellow color. If your hair is truly orange, you'll need to use a blue toner and a blue shampoo to tone the brassiness and work to get rid of the orange color.
To take any colour that is darker than blonde to blonde, you would need to have the starting colour lifted. So, in your case going from dyed red hair to blonde, a colourist would first need to lift out the red pigment, usually using bleach, and then placing your desired blonde on top.
To keep blonde hair from turning brassy
Clarifying shampoo can be especially helpful to blondes! Not only natural blondes but also for bleached-blonde hair, high lift blonde color treated hair or highlighted hair.
Hair toners work by depositing color molecules into the hair shaft, thereby neutralising or enhancing specific undertones. They can reduce brassiness, add warmth, create cooler tones, or increase the vibrancy of highlights.
Hard water, which contains high levels of minerals like iron and copper, can deposit on the hair. These metals react with the hair dye and often result in brassy or orange tones, especially for blondes and lighter shades.