Lifestyle Choices

One of the simplest and most effective ways of changing your appearance is to change the color of your hair. As we get older, the color of hair tends either to fade or to go darker, so that a once shimmery golden mane or deep mahogany tresses can become lackluster and dull. One of the best ways of remedying the situation is with a color boost. Hair coloring these days is effective and reasonably priced and can look even better than most natural hair—provided, of course, it is done correctly. Otherwise it can end up looking like a burnished haystack.

There are two categories of hair colorants: permanent colorants, which enter the cortex and cannot be washed out, and the temporary and the semipermanent, which can be used to highlight and intensify your own hair color but won’t alter the cortex.

The Temporary Colorants

These are the easiest to use. They coat the cuticle of the hair with color that washes away with the next shampoo. You can get temporary highlighting shampoos and color rinses in a great variety of colors that don’t disturb the cuticle imbrications. Most of them have a shine- promoting pH, too. But what you can do with them is limited, for while they will darken the hair—say from blond to red or to black—they are really designed for minor color changes only. If you try to go too many shades away from your natural color, they tend to streak and give uneven coverage. They also cannot make your hair lighter than it is, because they have no action on the cortex, where the melanin granules are —they merely coat the outside of the hair shaft.

The Semipermanents

Like the temporaries, these contain no peroxide. Instead, they are a combination of the same vegetable dyes with other chemicals such as a thioglycolate or sulfur, which suspend minute molecules of color for deeper penetration of the hair shaft and make them longer-lasting. They, too, coat the outside of the hair shaft and so are not good for drastically changing hair color. Nor will they lighten. What they are good for is touching up hair that has just started to go gray, highlighting your own natural coloring, and making gray hair look shinier and more attractive without really changing its shade. The “semis” are more alkaline than the “temporaries,” and so may do some damage to the hair cuticle. If you use one, be sure to use a pH-balanced shampoo afterward.

The Permanents

There are three kinds of permanent hair colorants: vegetable dyes such as henna, metallic dyes such as those used to gradually cover gray hair, and the aniline dyes or oxidation tints, which include most of the colorants used professionally in salons.

THE VEGETABLE DYES

Henna is the best-known, since its use dates back thousands of years. Taken from the Lawsonia plant, which is indigenous to Africa and Asia, henna varies in color depending on which country it comes from. It can be strong orange in color, as Moroccan henna, or a deep red, as the henna that comes from Iran—the most sought-after in the world. The plant is harvested, dried in the sun, and then crushed into a greenish powder, which is what one puts on the hair. It coats the hair shaft’s cuticle a reddish color.

The standard way of using henna is to add hot water to make a creamy paste and then put this on the hair and leave it for up to one hour. Daniel Galvin, Britain’s top colorist, who is an expert in the use of herbal hair colorings, uses a different method and gets beautiful results. He adds hot black coffee to the powder, mixes it into a paste, and then adds the juice of a fresh lemon and the yolk of an egg. The coffee brings out the depth and richness of the hair color, the acid in the lemon accelerates the reddening, and the egg yolk keeps the mixture moist and easy to maneuver through the hair. Sometimes he also adds some 10 percent peroxide to lighten the whole effect.

Henna will give brunette and black hair a lovely reddish glow—the darker your hair the more chestnut is the effect. Lighter hair goes Titian. Henna does not do well on mousy hair, as the resulting tone is usually an unattractive orange. It should never be used over a tint, is no good on gray hair, and can be very drying to any hair, so it is better to avoid it if your hair is already dry. Many of the henna products now on the market claim to have henna of many colors: brown, black, blond, etc. They contain metallic chemicals, which coat the hair and are troublemakers if later you want to tint or wave it. Avoid them. The only color of henna you should use is red, which in its natural, powder form is a pale green.

Camomile, another herbal colorant, has a gentle lightening effect on hair and is wonderful for “sun-streaking” blond and light brown hair.

But you must be patient, for it takes several applications and plenty of time to work. Its advantage over other bleaching methods is that, like the sun, it never brings a brassy or yellow tone to hair. Camomile-bleached hair looks exactly like natural hair with sun streaks. Even a professional colorist can’t tell the difference. It is not useful for brown hair or dark hair, but it will gently lighten red and works beautifully on all shades of natural blond. The herb also adds shine to the hair. There are two methods of using it: You can make a camomile rinse to use after each shampoo as the last rinse by taking 2 tablespoons of dried camomile flowers and tossing them into a pint of boiling water. Simmer for fifteen minutes, strain, cool, and use as a final rinse (you can make more at once and refrigerate it for up to ten days). You leave the rinse in your hair and towel it dry. The alternative way is faster in its effect. I devised it as a way of making use of the very delicate British sunlight to lighten hair. I do it about three times each summer to keep my naturally blond hair bright. Add one cup of dried camomile flowers to half a pint of boiling water for fifteen minutes. Cool. Simmer and strain. Add the juice of a fresh lemon to the infusion plus two tablespoons of a rich cream conditioner. Put it on dry hair, comb through, and then go and sit in the sun (with a sunscreen on your face, of course) until it dries. Finally, shampoo and condition as usual. You can use this method whenever you are going to be out in the sun for a few hours, and simply let the mixture dry on the hair. Your hair will be in beautiful condition by the time you shampoo it, at the end of the day.

Daniel has several other herbal tricks he often uses (in fact, he even mixes herbs with proprietary hair colorants for special effects, something no woman should ever do at home). For instance, he boils saffron root in water for thirty minutes and then dilutes his solution to whatever strength is required for use as a water rinse on blond hair. It gives a vibrant, canary-yellow tone. He uses an infusion of marigolds as a final rinse to give blond hair delicate yellow tones, and he relies on sage to darken graying hair by adding herbs to a pint of water (the amount of sage depends on the darkening effect required), boiling for fifteen minutes, straining, and using as a final rinse.

All herb treatments except perhaps henna are gentle and not intended for drastic changes in color.

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