Red hair to violet...Possible?

If you want a deep purple, you could get away with it, just, at a push. Violet? Not a hope in hells chance of just dying over red! It's a paler colour for a start so that makes it impossible on its own 🙂

So yes, you absolutely have to use a colour remover. More than once if you've been using red that long. It might not even be possible without destroying your hair unfortunately. Red fades fast, but it also clings (I know it sounds stupid, but it's true!). So getting rid of enough of the orange to get violet is often impossible.

You can definitely still try though!

I know the Wella Koleston colour you mean and it is more of a cool toned burgundy than the name red violet would suggest isn't it?

I'm not entirely certain with Revlon colours as I haven't used them but I know that usually /6 denotes violet based colours anyway so I think  a 55/60 would be a violet with neither warm or cool undertones and a 55/65 denotes violet with a red undertone so the colours should be fairly similar and both are level 5 so would be similar there too, the only advice I can give from my experience though is that when I went from using Koleston 5/4 (light brown with auburn undertones ) to 5/5 (light brown with red undertones) I got a band of darker colour where the roots met the previously dyed hair, which has remained darker as the colour faded. I would say you could probably chance it, but if it would bother you to end up with a darker band then go ahead and use a colour remover first just to be certain.

I know the Wella Koleston colour you mean and it is more of a cool toned burgundy than the name red violet would suggest isn't it?

I'm not entirely certain with Revlon colours as I haven't used them but I know that usually /6 denotes violet based colours anyway so I think  a 55/60 would be a violet with neither warm or cool undertones and a 55/65 denotes violet with a red undertone so the colours should be fairly similar and both are level 5 so would be similar there too, the only advice I can give from my experience though is that when I went from using Koleston 5/4 (light brown with auburn undertones ) to 5/5 (light brown with red undertones) I got a band of darker colour where the roots met the previously dyed hair, which has remained darker as the colour faded. I would say you could probably chance it, but if it would bother you to end up with a darker band then go ahead and use a colour remover first just to be certain.

Yes, it's more a burgundy tone, sorry about that.  :-[
Thanks so much for your advice! It has helped me a lot 🙂 I will probably use the colour remover.

Sorry, I missed that it was RED violet, I was thinking about the title of the thread still and so many people have wanted to go from red to violet. You can Ignore me 🙂

Sorry, I missed that it was RED violet, I was thinking about the title of the thread still and so many people have wanted to go from red to violet. You can Ignore me 🙂

Noooo it's totally fine! 🙂 It was actually my mistake, my bad. ://
And you took the time to reply! I appreciate it!  ;D

Yeah the colour remover could well be a good idea, I looked up a swatch of the one you are currently using and despite the colour number suggesting a red violet it looks a lot warmer than the Koleston equivalent, so it could end up making the purple tones of the new one a bit muddy. Just make sure you rinse the colour remover out more than it says on the instructions, as much as you can stand to rinse it with hot water and rest it a few days so that you can wash it a few times in between to stop it reoxidising! (it may well look ginger once you remove the dye as it will go to the colour it has been lifted to by the previous dyes, not your natural colour, it is however safe to use something like Adore on it in the meantime if you wanted to as this doesn't contain a developer so won't reoxidise).

There's some good info about colour removers (specifically Colour B4, but they all work similarly) here http://www.hairdyeforum.com/index.php/topic,3462.0.html