Neutralizing orange Hair with DIY toner, enough for turquoise dye to show

This is actually the most recent post on my blog. I started out with this, green roots, turquoise middle strands, blueish tips. And a pink and purple section in the underlayer.

I decided to make my roots match the rest of my hair so I bleached them. Mmm, glamorous.

I only left the bleach on for 30 minutes and rinsed right away. Also, that entire time i kept rinsing my hair tips under the tap so that the bleach running off wouldn't bleach them. I was only going for bleached roots and didn't want to overprocess my already bleached tips.

I have thick naturally black asian hair, so the most my bleaching session did was give me orange and banana hair, even if I started out with a green base. Underneath the green it was still a pretty strong yellow (having only been bleached once before).

Normally people would advise wait a month and then do a bleach bath and then tone, since those yellows are too strong to tone right now.

I agree, if you're using this Directions Toner. There's no way this light a color will work on orangey yellow hair.

So I made a stronger DIY toner from a tiny amount of Directions Plum and a LOT of conditioner.



(If you have super light hair, this mixture will turn your hair lavender if left on long enough.

So now I had a stronger "toner" I slathered it on my hair and left it on 10 minutes.

Because my hair is not bleached to a pale yellow and I have some light oranges hanging around there, the most this will do is neutralize my orange to a dull peach, and the lightest yellows will turn very pale purple. Which is fine since I’m not going for white, I’m neutralizing. No need for me to be neurotic about the “purple tinge” if I leave toner on for more than 5 minutes.

After rinsing, no more glaring yellows, more of a dull peach and very pale purple base.

Mixed a little blue into the turquoise dye just to make sure it came out more blue than green. Added conditioner to dilute the color a little bit.

Rinsed.

Towel dried/patted very gently. Fluffy:

Combed, dried, and a nice soothing keratin treatment later:

And that's how I dyed a base that wasn't pale yellow - and still got turquoise - I just neutralized it first.

Hope it helps.