Golden blonde to medium ASH blonde???? No bleach

Can you post a pic of your actual hair?
You can definitely tone a golden blonde to a more ashy shade, but you may have to go slightly darker to counteract the warmth.

Can you post a pic of your actual hair?
You can definitely tone a golden blonde to a more ashy shade, but you may have to go slightly darker to counteract the warmth.

This is my current hair, the light does it not much justice as it is a little lighter and more golden in real life but it gives you a good idea. It is especially a contrast to the ash colour I want in the photo posted earlier  🙁

I'll give this a go, I have some experience with natural colours, the colour wheel and base levels. Basically you need that much colour theory to give this a go yourself!

If you only went to the hairdresser yesterday, go back and give them a chance to fix it. They often don't charge for it if you go back before you've gone to another hairdresser as that adds more variables.

It's difficult to tell with the lighting exactly what you have, it doesn't look light enough for purple shampoo to do anything. Ash hair dyes are usually green, purple or grey based and different bases work better depending on how light your hair is. It's like the often mentioned diluting purple to tone yellow, and diluting blue to tone orange. To get an ash blonde, you need to really have no orange at all in the base hair or the ash will only tone to neutral, the ash won't show up. If you have naturally auburn hair there will be a lot of red in the base, and it'll be difficult to counteract.  Also bear in mind that ash tones fade quickly, and if you overdo it you'll see the green/purple/grey.

To get from auburn to ash blonde at a hairdresser, you would probably have to go to an expensive colourist as without doing a colour correction (this is what they call anything that is beyond the usual lighten/dark up to 2 tones using a peroxide dye) nothing will be ashy enough. Ideally you'd need a yellow blonde base with no orange whatsoever, and then an ash dye on top of that.

If you have a green semi around, you could dilute that and it will tone to give a darker cast. It might look a bit muddy though. A medium ash brown box dye could work, but most likely there isn't enough ash tone in there as the peroxide lift would reveal the underlying warmth in the hair so the best you'd end up with is the ash in the dye toning it to neutral. In general, you have to go one level lighter than the target colour before applying ash.

So I would reduce your expectations to a medium ash brown and strand test the various box dyes you have access to. And try toning with dilute green. There's an ash Adore dye, Medium Brown I think (check with others on the forum who have used it), that might give you more suitable tones. Otherwise it would be a two step process of bleaching to yellow and then applying a permanent dye as toner from a colour line that tends towards ash, such as Wella Illumina. Of course note that double processing is not recommended on this forum and may compromise the condition of your hair.

True ash is difficult!

Thank you for the reply! 🙂

By neutral what do you exactly mean? I am very unexperienced with hair and don't think I could ever attempt a green semi or bleaching, I think the furthest I would go is placing a box dye over my head as I just know it would go wrong haha.

I don't think I could go back to the hairdresser, as I really did emphasise that I wanted ASH, COOL tones and I was so upset to see my hair was very very warm and even quite dull. I even showed her the same photo tagged in the post of what I wanted. I kind of knew that to get the ash colour I would need to go a bit lighter, in order to go darker. However she started with a very dark colour and then just toned it?

Do you think it is worth attempting to dye my hair with a medium ash colour? Or do you really think this would have very little effect and I should leave it to a professional at a different salon?

I have also had a thought. Would putting a light ash blonde hair dye on my hair not take any sort of effect, or would it just accentuate the brassiness?

Again, thank you 🙂

Hair colour can be warm or cool (ash). Between the two is neutral. If you have a warm base and you apply ash, you will end up at neutral.

The same dyes can give a different result depending on an individual's hair, which is why you normally can go back for them to fix it but it might be a bit late now. If you keep hopping salons they don't have a chance to figure out what works for your hair. Of course, this does mean you need to find somewhere that can do it to begin with.

You could try a medium ash colour but do a strand test. Probably there isn't enough ash pigment in the kind of dye you can buy off the shelf to show an ash result. Since the peroxide with expose the underlying warmth in your hair, you might get a flatter, neutral colour with a semi like either Adore Medium Brown (you can dilute it with conditioner to a point where it's dark enough to tone but not so dark it makes your hair brown), or using a green from something like Directions, again diluted like when we make homemade toners from purple/blue.

Any kind of lighter hair dye will basically just very lightly bleach your hair, bringing out the warm undertones.