This post is going to tell you what you need to know about toner… and really about bleaching your hair in general. This post is inspired by my recent hair adventure/fiasco!
I decided to cut my hair. It was just getting way too long, so I chopped off six inches! I’ll still be cutting off another inch or two, but I decided that I should probably do my bleaching (for the ombre look) before I cut off the last couple inches. This is what I was hoping for..
And this is what I got.. Yeah I was not happy. It’s hard to tell in that picture, but my hair at the top is a ridiculous orange color.
So here’s why my hair turned out waaaay differently than I’d planned!
I bleached my hair twice, and after I’d bleached my hair was dark at the roots as I had planned and the ends of my hair were orangey, which is what happens when you lift dark hair. So let me take a pause here and explain why this happens. Brown hair is really beautiful because of all the dimension – all of the red tones that are present. Blonde hair tends to be a lot more flat, which is not a good look on brown hair (usually). So when you bleach your hair, you lift your hair and while the color is lighter, there are all of those red tones that made your brown hair beautiful but make your light hair an ugly orange color.
How do you fix this? TONER! Toner is amazing. (For brassy/orangey tones, I recommend Wella’s T14 Pale Ash Blonde Toner). Once you get your hair light enough, all you need to do is tone it. This basically adjusts the color of the hair within the same color family. In other words, you can change the color of the hair without lifting it. And here’s where I went wrong (because I didn’t understand developer), I used a 40 volume developer with my toner. HUGE mistake. This volume developer actually lifted my roots! After I’d toned the first time, I saw my orange roots and freaked out. Immediately, I went to tone it again, which again lifted it and only made the problem worse. So here’s what you need to know so that you don’t make the same mistake.
Developer is used to activate dye, bleach, or toner. The volume of developer that you use depends on the amount of lift/darkening you will be doing. For toner, you just want to deposit the color and NOT lift or darken, so you should use a 5-10 volume developer. If you want to lift or darken your hair by a shade or so, you should use 20 volume developer. If you want to lift or darken your hair by 2-3 shades, you should use a 30 volume developer. If you want to lift or darken your hair by 3-4 shades, you should use a 40 volume developer.
Once I figured this out, I toned a couple more times, and it’s much better now! Also, when you’re toning, make sure you’re using a proper ratio of toner to developer (1 part toner, 2 parts developer). If you don’t have this ratio right, then you might not be toning properly.
So the biggest lesson you should learn here is that a 10 volume OR LESS developer should be used with toner. Don’t make the mistake of using a 40 volume developer with your toner and get the super light brown/orange disaster that I had!
