How can I get THIS colour :( ?

Both of those photos look to me like they are people with dark ash blonde hair naturally who have added highlights. You may be able to get highlights and tone them to a cool pearl or champagne blonde, but you might find it difficult to get the ashy base - me and my siblings all have this ash colour naturally and my mum has been trying to dye her hair (mid brown with warm coppery undertones) the same as ours for years but she really struggles to keep the warm tones out of it. (also there doesn't seem to be too many dark ash dyes on the market).

Both of those photos look to me like they are people with dark ash blonde hair naturally who have added highlights. You may be able to get highlights and tone them to a cool pearl or champagne blonde, but you might find it difficult to get the ashy base - me and my siblings all have this ash colour naturally and my mum has been trying to dye her hair (mid brown with warm coppery undertones) the same as ours for years but she really struggles to keep the warm tones out of it. (also there doesn't seem to be too many dark ash dyes on the market).

Thank you for your answer. Haha your mother then has the same problem as me. So basically what I have to do is bleach my hair, dye it dark ash blonde (6.1) and then have some highlights done. Is that correct? Is the result permanent?

Yes, I think that would be the way to do it, but like I say you might struggle to get it ashy enough. It will be permanent in the fact that you will be using permanent dyes but it will tend to go back brassy as the tint fades eventually

You really think so? Bleach, then dye and highlights? That's a lot and some of it seems redundant maybe?

could you post a photo of your hair at the moment so it gives us a clearer idea of how to get it to the colour you'd like?

Edited to add -

When I wanted a natural blonde, I bleached my hair to a pale yellow, then used  non damaging toners to get the blonde shades I wanted. To get past the orange stage you may need to lighten the hair again with a bleach bath after a month from the last bleach. Or it may be that you need to keep your hair a bit warmer when the bleach is developing, and tone afterwards with a blue or purple toner

Sorry, I didn't mean bleach, then dye, then highlights - I thought you meant if you could get the ash blonde you wanted just with a dye then highlights - I'm not sure there would be another way to get that multi-tone ash blonde like the photos as like I say they are people with natural ash blonde hair with highlights - what I actually meant was that I'm not sure they are the best reference photos as they might not be something you can achieve!

If you were to just go for a single ash blonde shade, then that would probably be more achievable and I'd go about it the way glitterpix said.

You could always do it the way Glitterpix said and take it all to the lighter colour then add darker ash streaks with a direct dye? That would maybe help with the multi-tonal look?

Again sorry for my incomplete previous answer - someone phoned me whilst I was writing it and I posted it without fully thinking it through!

could you post a photo of your hair at the moment so it gives us a clearer idea of how to get it to the colour you'd like?

Edited to add -

When I wanted a natural blonde, I bleached my hair to a pale yellow, then used  non damaging toners to get the blonde shades I wanted. To get past the orange stage you may need to lighten the hair again with a bleach bath after a month from the last bleach. Or it may be that you need to keep your hair a bit warmer when the bleach is developing, and tone afterwards with a blue or purple toner

Of course, that's my natural hair colour. As I said before, it's a dark shade of blonde (though unless it's under direct sunlight it may look light brown) with subtle copper undertones. It's a nice colour actually; I just want it to be lighter without turning ORANGE; in other words, I want a COOL shade of blonde, but I cannot just dye it because any blonde dye will just mix with my natural base and turn ORANGE. That's why I think it's better to bleach it first (until it reaches a pale yellow shade) and then use a dye (dark ash blonde, 6.1).

Thank you.

what youdo is bleach it and then use a blonde, none oxidative (direct dye) toner to tone the colour to blonde. Using a bleach, then a blonde dye is doing the same job twice, even if one process is normally not effective enough, it doesn't mean you need to do it twice after using an effective one.

Or, if it is actually coming out light enough for you when you use the blonde dyes, just too orange, then just tone the orange out. For that you just need a blue direct dye which you then dilute with cheap white conditioner. Blue is the opposite on the colour wheel to orange, when put together they neautralise each other.

I don't agree with lauralei about the first picture being highlights. To me that looks like hair lightened by the sun, but that affect is exaggerated by the photo editing and the colour balance and brightness being played with. Something it's impossible to recreate. The second one, it looks like grown out highlights to me, or 'frosted tips' (do they even call it that anymore?).

I do agree with her that it's hard to maintain this kind of colour if you have coppery tones in your hair. You'll have to continually tone, so you'll need to use the diluted blue dye often.

Yeah I thought the second one was 'frosted tips' but didn't want to call it that and reveal my age ha! Could well be that the first one is an enhanced photo, I thought highlights as a couple of strands look like very distinct lines, but that can happen naturally in the sun - either way my main point was that both of those photos looked like a natural ash base!

From that photo your hair doesn't look very warm toned, I think it's possible that the bleach or dyes you've used in the past just might not have been very good and brought out more brassy tones than they should.

Yeah, I have to say, I thought the same but thought it was my ipad making the colour look more ash. I see very little, if any, copper in that now I'm on my PC.

what youdo is bleach it and then use a blonde, none oxidative (direct dye) toner to tone the colour to blonde. Using a bleach, then a blonde dye is doing the same job twice, even if one process is normally not effective enough, it doesn't mean you need to do it twice after using an effective one.

Or, if it is actually coming out light enough for you when you use the blonde dyes, just too orange, then just tone the orange out. For that you just need a blue direct dye which you then dilute with cheap white conditioner. Blue is the opposite on the colour wheel to orange, when put together they neautralise each other.

I don't agree with lauralei about the first picture being highlights. To me that looks like hair lightened by the sun, but that affect is exaggerated by the photo editing and the colour balance and brightness being played with. Something it's impossible to recreate. The second one, it looks like grown out highlights to me, or 'frosted tips' (do they even call it that anymore?).

I do agree with her that it's hard to maintain this kind of colour if you have coppery tones in your hair. You'll have to continually tone, so you'll need to use the diluted blue dye often.

Hello, Janineb. Thank you very much for your answer. Once I bleach my hair, I guess it will be too light, it will have a pale yellow shade of blonde, so if I apply just a toner it will take the brassiness out but the resulting colour will be still too light and I don't want that, I want a dark ash blonde colour. That is the reason why I think I should apply a dye (dark ash blonde 6.1) after the bleaching process. I think I don't understand what you mean by "none oxidative, direct dye" and "white conditioner".

Another thing I have done several times in order to tone my hair is using blue dye (0/88) with 10vol. peroxide for 10 minutes (I have to be careful because I don't want to end up with blue hair), but the results last for less than two weeks. Maybe I should leave it for longer...?

Ok I have seen that the two pictures I posted may be confusing, so I have attached a few more pictures of people with the hair colour that I would want to get (I know some of them may have highlights but I'm not particularly interested in them, but rather in the base).

Thanks!!

I know what it is you want. As you said, you want dark ash blonde. But if there's copper in it, then it won't tone to blonde, it'll tone brown and darker than all those photos. Don't bleach to a pale yellow, bleach to a dark yellow. You don't have to leave the bleach on the whole time. You might be misreading this yellow as orange though.

Regardless, even if it is a bit too light, you just add a slightly darker ash blonde direct dye instead of toning. It's hard to know what the next step will be until we know what you get from the first step.

Using direct dyes (dyes you DON'T mis with peroxide) that you can then dilute with conditioner is the best way to go. That way you can top up often as it fades with no damage. The fading of oxidative dyes (ones that you DO mix with peroxide as you've been using) is why I find them next to pointless.

Adore dyes http://www.beeunique.co.uk/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=151 are good for this. They have a good range of natural and unnatural colours, including blue.

Using direct dyes (dyes you DON'T mis with peroxide) that you can then dilute with conditioner is the best way to go. That way you can top up often as it fades with no damage. The fading of oxidative dyes (ones that you DO mix with peroxide as you've been using) is why I find them next to pointless.

This is the part that I don't understand very well. Do you mean that a permanent dye will eventually fade and a direct dye won't? If it fades, what is the resulting colour? How long should I leave the conditioner mixed with the dye?

No, I'm not saying a direct dye won't fade. I'm saying, it will fade, but you can top it up often with no damage. You can't do that when using permanent dyes. But the permanent dyes still fade, as you've found out. Why use something, often expensive, that damages quite heavily when you can use something cheaper that lasts almost as long and doesn't damage.

There's no set time for how long you leave the direct dye (with or without conditioner) as it's totally non damaging. Again though, until we know what resultyou actually get from bleaching or whatever method you choose, then it's difficult to predict. It might not be that you actually need blue. You might just need purple, or something in between.