How to remove / brighten yellow patches in hair

Question

Recently I dyed my girlfriends hair with a standard blonde hair dye kit you can get from boots / super drug (cosmetic stores) and it has turned some of the hair a yellow colour as opposed to the blonde colour desired.

The pack comes with shampoo that's designed to brighten these yellow parts but it doesn't really work so I was wondering if there were any household products or easily obtainable (cheap) products that could be used to brighten these yellow bits of hair? Also any tips on how to avoid it going yellow in the first place would be appreciated!

Her natural hair colour is brown and the dye is mainly to touch up the roots as they come through over time - professional salons are so expensive and to be honest don't do that great of a job!

Answer 1

There's no 'hack' answer I'd suggest, other than the relatively safe but probably, in this case, totally ineffectual application of neat lemon juice left on for a while. I'd advise caution though - sometimes, dyed blond can start to look green when other chemicals are applied (chlorine being the obvious one, but chemical reactions are possible even with lemon juice, so its hard to predict the outcome).

If its orangey yellow, it means the product you used is not powerful enough to 'lift' the basic hair colour, or you didn't leave it on long enough. Any hair colour containing peroxide is very efficient at creating blond, but again, the results vary according to how long its been left on;- too short a time and it'll be orangey yellow, too long means the hair will start to degrade, becomes fragile and starts to break. If the product you bought came with something to apply after the colour, that's probably a toner, which is meant to knock out any yellow/orangey tones - if that didn't do the trick, then it's likely nothing is going to.

You could, though, try a 'silver' shampoo, such as L'Oreal Professional Silver - its purple when applied, but will brighten dull blond hair and does reduce yellow/orange tones. If that doesn't help, the hair colour needs to be corrected, preferably by a professional.