Hair Color Ideas to Survive a Recession

The Houston Chronical recently printed an article about coloring your hair at home to save money. According to Proctor & Gamble, about 65% of women color their hair. With the current economic conditions, the question is if you can color your hair at home to save money without damaging your hair or ending up with a funky color.

Home hair color kits used to be extremely harsh. In fact, the chemicals were so harsh, a urine test could show whether or not you colored your hair! Thank goodness things have changed and home coloring kits are now much more sophisticated in addition to saving you money.

As an example of what you can save by coloring at home, Clairol Nice N Easy Perfect 10 sells for about $13.99, which is substantially less than have your hair colored at a salon. It takes about 10 minutes to color your hair and does not have any harsh chemicals.

If you are going to color at home, here are a few tips.

1. Touch Up Your Roots
If you're roots are showing, its a dead giveaway that you color your hair and haven't redone it in a while. There are several products specifically made for root touch ups. The range from $6.99 in your local drug store to $23 in retailers like Sephora.

2. Gloss
Using a hair gloss about a week after touching up roots gives your hair an extra boost. Not only will you see richer color, it will help keep your hair healthy.

3. Don't Shampoo So Often
Frequent shampoos can cause color to fade. Jason Backe, Clairol color director and master colorist at Ted Gibson salon in New York, recommends shampooing every 3 days. Use a shampoo and conditioner specifically for color treated hair in cool water. The cool water keeps the hair cuticle smooth, thus locking in color. If you need to rinse more often than 3 days, just condition and rinse with cool water.

4. Read the Directions
You can avoid most home hair coloring disasters by reading the directions. Make sure you do not leave the color on too long.

5. Be Realistic
Stay within 2 shades of your natural color if you are doing the coloring at home. Anything more than that will lead to less predictable results. If you do want to make a major change, you're still better off spending the money to go to a salon.

If you're not sure how far you can go with color, The Hair Styler has an extremely helpful tool where you can try colors on before you commit to the dye. You can check it out by going to The Hair Styler.